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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION 
OF JESUS 


‘ WILLIAM OWEN CARVER, .a., TH.D., LL.D. 









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WILLIAM OWEN CARVER, M.aA., TH.D., LL.D. 
AUTHOR OF “ACTS—A COMMENTARY,” “MISSIONS IN THE 
PLAN OF THE AGES,’ “THE BIBLE A MISSIONARY 


MESSAGE,” ETC. 


NEW wy YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, 
BY THE SUNDAY SCHOOL BOARD 
OF THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 
ay Re 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


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GEORGE 


AN INTERPRETER OF JESUS 
WHO TYPED THE PAGES FOR ME 


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INTRODUCTORY 


All the words of Jesus are revealing of His per- 
sonality. This is true of us all. Our words are 
ourselves at the instant of their expression. A. 
man’s speech is his self-expression. Jesus Christ 
is the ‘‘Word’”’ of God. Ina similar way Chris- 
tians are the ‘‘Word”’ of the Christ. Words are 
the means of communication of personality with 
personality. This is why Jesus is called the 
‘‘Word’’ of God, and why we who bear His name 
are called the ‘‘Word’’ of Christ. All words ex- 
press the personality of the speaker. Certain 
words on certain occasions are more revealing, 
and more vitally revealing, than other words and 
on other occasions. We say that our words some- 
times misrepresent us. We do not wish to be 
judged, nor to judge ourselves, by some of the 
words that we speak. Jesus does not ask any such 
exemption. He is the one man who never needed 
or desired to retract any word which had gone 
forth from His mouth and His heart. P. Whit- 
well Wilson has well referred to Him as the one 
Friend no word of whom we need ever apologize 
for or wish to have changed. Yet the words of 
Jesus on certain special occasions count for more 
in our understanding of Him than other words of 
His. The Gospels have preserved for us a few 
of the ‘‘Words of grace which He _ spake,’’ 
from among the vastly greater bulk of His 


vu 


INTRODUCTORY 


utterances. Crises come in every life. What 
we say and do in these critical situations re- 
veals the innermost character of us. We may 
think of Washington’s Farewell Address; Lin- 
coln’s Speech at Gettysburg; Lee’s words at 
Appomattox; Wilson’s address to Congress call- 
ing the country to war; Pershing’s reputed re- 
mark at LaFayette’s Tomb. We think of Paul’s 
response to the vision of Jesus on the Damascus 
road, on Mars Hill at Athens, to the Jews in 
Jerusalem, at Rome facing his martyrdom. 

So in the Gospels we may readily discover situ- 
ations in which the words of Jesus reveal the 
depths of His own self-consciousness, of His con- 
viction concerning His relation to God, the uni- 
verse and history, and His conception of how He 
is related to humanity. In these studies we have 
selected some of these critically significant occa- 
sions from the life and ministry of Jesus and 
made an effort to interpret the occasion and un- 
derstand the words which He spoke. In nearly all 
cases He was not primarily interpreting Himself. 
This is only a secondary factor in His speech. 
We study this self-consciousness in His normal 
speech under significant circumstances. All the 
better do we thus ascertain how we are to think 
of Him. He never sought to prejudge a reaction 
to Himself nor to impose an estimate of His per- 
sonality. Usually He does not seem even to be 
aiding inquiry as to Himself or to be concerned 
what men might be thinking of Him. He lives, 
acts, speaks as He would, and we hear Him and 
discern ‘‘what manner of Man He is.’’ 

Vill 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


I 


II 


iil 


IV 


Vv 


VI 


VII 


THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS: DISCLOS- 
ING HIS CONCEPTION OF HIMSELF . ° ° 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE: TO FULFILL 
ALL RIGHTEOUSNESS . . . : . 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS: JESUS REVEALS HIS 
PRINCIPLES OF CONDUCT . ° . : . 


THE HOME-COMING SERMON: DEFINING HIS RE- 
LATION TO MESSIANIC PROPHECY . . . 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT: JESUS DECLARES 
HIS IDEALS FOR KINGDOM MEN 


IN A SOLILOQUY JESUS ASSUMES THE MORAL 
BURDEN OF THE HUMAN RACE . . ° ° 


UPON PETER’S CONFESSION JESUS ANNOUNCES 
THE METHOD OF HIS CHURCH . . 


GOING TO JERUSALEM FOR THE LAST TIME JESUS 
OFFERS HIMSELF AS THE JEWS’ MESSIAH AND 
THE WORLD’S SAVIOR ‘ ; : } p 


IN THE UPPER ROOM WITH THE TWELVE JESUS 
PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT . . 


JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS HIS FOLLOWERS TO 
CARRY HIS SALVATION TO ALL MEN . ° . 


PAGE 


13 


26 


40 


56 


68 


89 


105 


119 


137 


160 


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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION 
OF JESUS 





CHAPTER I 


THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS: DISCLOSING HIS 
CONCEPTION OF HIMSELF (Luke 2: 40-52) 


‘“Why is it that ye sought me? Did ye not 
know that I must be in the midst of the affairs 
of my Father?’’ We often treasure the first words 
of those who mean much to us. We remember the 
first words of our children. We sometimes recall 
and cherish the first sentence spoken by one who 
became an intimate friend. Here we have the first 
words of Jesus that can be known to us. Of 
course, they are not His first words. Mary—and 
Joseph—had already a great volume of His say- 
ings revolving and brooding in their proud and 
puzzled hearts. These are the first that are pre- 
served for humanity. No doubt they were thought 
of by Luke as being the first sentence of His mes- 
sage to mankind, His first interpretation of Him- 
self to Himself and to men. Hence his record of 
them. 

Before taking up the words it will be important 
to try to reproduce the circumstances under which 
they were spoken. The entire occasion will help us 
to understand the nature and stage of develop- 
ment in His character. At twelve years of age He 
has gone with His parents to the Passover Feast 
in Jerusalem. We are not to think of this as the 

13 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


first time He had visited the Holy City of His 
people and of His traditional religion. But this 
visit is recorded because of the incident and of 
what it signifies concerning Him and His work. 
The story is one of the most familiar, because it 
is one of the most beautiful and useful of all 
stories. At the age of twelve a Jewish boy was 
supposed to be introduced to the Rabbis, inducted 
into a personal share in the temple worship, and to 
become ‘‘a child of the Law.’’ All this experi- 
ence had doubtless come to Jesus at this time. He 
had taken quite unusual interest in it all. The 
week of the feast was over. The caravan in which 
His family had traveled from Nazareth had set 
out for the return journey. Joseph and Mary had 
assumed that Jesus would find His place in the 
company and did not inquire for Him until they 
were pitching tent for the night. The inquiry for 
Him would grow to alarmed search and lead to a 
restless, wakeful night. The next day took them 
back to Jerusalem in the search for the missing 
lad. Then on the next morning ‘‘they found Him 
in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, 
both hearing them, and asking them questions,”’ 
while all the onlookers and listeners manifestly 
‘‘were amazed at His understanding and His an- 
swers.’’ There are several items in what we may 
learn of Jesus from the whole situation. 

1. First of all we may note His self-reliance 
and His reliability. Now, self-reliance is no un- 
common thing in a boy of twelve. Most of them 
are quite more willing to take care of themselves 
than are their parents to trust them to direct their 

14 





THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS 


conduct and care for their needs. Reliance and 
reliability are not always matched in the boy. He 
sometimes claims more in self-confidence than can 
be granted in confidence. Jesus was left during 
the feast to look after Himself and He did ut. 
This shows how far the parents had already 
learned to trust Him. With the normal residents 
and the Passover Pilgrims, the city and all its sur- 
rounding spaces would be crowded, with a million 
or more people. In all this throng Joseph and 
Mary so far knew that Jesus was competent and to 
be trusted that they left Him to do as He pleased. 
Not even when setting off for home again did it 
seem necessary to make sure He was going along. 
Of course such confident treatment was based on 
experience. How self-reliant and trustworthy 
they must have found their boy for many years, 
now! He knew how to find His way in the city 
and in the throngs of people. He knew where to 
go and how to demean Himself in the temple and 
among the different classes of people. To be 
competent without being ‘‘smart,’’ to be perti- 
nent and not ‘‘pert,’’ to be at the fore and not be 
‘‘forward,’’ how difficult that is, and how every. 
noble boy and girl has been chagrined at not being 
able to keep, or to seem to keep, the balance in 
these delicate scales. To be normally self-expres- 
sive and not to become self-assertive, to act on the 
consciousness of self-hood and not be either em- 
barrassed or emboldened by self-consciousness is 
a problem all the older of us can well remember, 
even though we seem usually so incapable of mak- 
ing the lads and lasses know that we understand 
15 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


them when they grapple with the same problem. 

2. We find in Jesus at this time a combination 
of information and acquisitiveness. He amazed 
all who heard Him by ‘‘His understanding and 
His answers,’’ but also He was ‘‘both hearing the 
rabbis and asking them questions.’’ He knew, 
really knew, some things better than the teachers 
and some things they didn’t know at all. That 
was an achievement for a lad of twelve, and a 
great strain on Him. There was no bravado, no 
gloating, no priggishness. He really knew, but 
He also knew His ignorance. He related Him- 
self to knowledge in the spirit of humility that 
excluded proud self-assertion. How wonderful, 
that, for even the maturest wise man. To know 
an amazing amount and to remain keen for learn- 
ing, that is the wisdom of getting knowledge. 

3. To His parents this Boy was a satisfaction 
and an anxiety. Such is every child. We were all 
born problems. Every mother can tell you how 
true that is. And every father knows how big a 
load of problem pressed upon him when in proud 
reverence he held his first-born in his arms. Chil- 
dren can’t help being problems, and they are not 
to blame for it, unless they make themselves too 
insoluble a problem and remain too long a prob- 
lem. Every boy must be a problem to all who 
are related to him until he takes over his own 
problem and enters definitely upon its right solu- 
tion. Then what a satisfying joy he becomes. 

The best boys, the cleverest and brightest are 
often the greatest problems. Their superior 
capacities call for more delicate handling and 

16 


THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS 


more elaborate planning. Their education, their 
control, their guidance, are all more complicated 
than in the case of the ‘‘normal’’ boy. Our most 
serious blunders have grown out of our thinking’ 
there is such a thing as a ‘‘normal’’ boy or girl 
and of defining the norm in terms of ourselves— 
of ourselves only very faultily remembered. 

What satisfaction and what pride Joseph and 
Mary had often and always found in their unusual 
Boy. But how He did puzzle them! 

And His parents were also a problem to Him— 
more serious than we can realize. It is always 
so with any serious child. How often he is grieved 
and distressed and sometimes cowed and re- 
pressed by the consciousness that his motives are 
misjudged, his conduct falsely appraised, his de- 
sires not understood. And he dares not try to 
explain. How utterly alone every child feels at 
times. Jesus must have had many such an hour in 
His experience already; and He was sure to have 
very many more. 

4, Wecan note in Him remarkable development 
and immaturity. He was a very unusual child; 
that impressed others. He had much to learn; 
that was the dominant fact in His own thought 
of Himself. If Saul of Tarsus could say of him- 
self, that ‘‘he advanced in the Jews’ religion be- 
yond many of his own age’’ (Gal.1:14) surely 
Jesus was mature much above His years. He 
accepts His unusual gifts as a profound responsi- 
bility. He must learn more and do more because 
of the capacity He could not help seeing was 
within Himself. That is a very wonderful word 

17 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


‘with which Luke closes the narrative of this 
unique incident: ‘‘And Jesus grew in wisdom and 
stature, and in favor with God and men.’’ 

We may get the force of this statement better 
if we compare it with what is said of Him, at 
verse 40, as an infant. There we read that ‘‘the 
child grew and waxed strong, becoming full of 
wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him.’’ 
There the words are all in the passive mode. They 
express unconscious, un-aimed experience of 
growth and development. It was all experience 
and none of achievement here recorded. 

But of the Boy we turn to our Greek and find a 
wholly different word for His growth. No longer 
did He merely wncrease, now He advanced. And 
the significance of the Greek word cannot be over- 
looked. Luke wrote it mpoéxonrev. The base 
(root) of the word means cut; the apo is for- 
ward, ahead; the tense is imperfect, of continuous, 
persistent action. All that speaks of a goal, and 
of obstacles and difficulties; speaks of determina- 
tion and effort unceasing and unremitting. He 
saw what He needed and went after it. He-cut- 
his-way-forward, He ‘‘forged ahead,’’ as we say. 
There was much cutting to do: thickets of prej- 
udice and misunderstanding; trammels of pov- 
erty and manifold, homely, home tasks; huge bar- 
riers of tradition, custom and convention; roots 
of Hebrew language, Greek construction, Latin 
vernacular; of history wrongly conceived and of 
religion misunderstood. It would take keen tools 
and steady effort. But He-cut-his-way-forward. 

5. Once more, we find the Boy Jesus combining 

18 


THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS 


in His conduct and relations autonomy of action 
with obedience in behavior. Luke tells us how 
He gave Mary and Joseph to understand that He 
must determine His actions by His consciousness 
of relation and responsibility to God; and then 
he tells us how ‘‘He went down with them and 
came to Nazareth; and He was subject unto 
them.’’ It is no wonder Luke says ‘‘they under- 
stood not the saying which He spake unto them,’’ 
and that ‘‘His mother kept all the things in her 
heart.’’ She had more than a heartful with this 
wonderful Lad. 


Now against this partially outlined background 
we must come directly to the Words of Jesus, and 
see what they may tell us of His self-conscious- 
ness. 

1. We meet, first of all, His disappointment at 
the misunderstanding of Him by Mary and Jos- 
eph. This misunderstanding of Him by men— 
all men—is one of the experiences Jesus had 
to meet, that the Christ has to deal with all the 
way through. We shall find Him giving us this as 
one of our topics in these studies of Him. At the 
end He will be saying that eternal life consists in 
knowing Him as the one sent by the Father. In 
the very first word we hear from Him, Jesus is ex- 
pressing grief at not being understood, and by that 
soul who knew and loved Him most already. 

It seems a pity the feeling of necessity for dig- 
nified language has obscured for us, in all the ver- 
sions, the homely simplicity and the maternal im- 
patience and grief with which Mary addressed the 

19 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


Son she had at last found. Our hearts will tell us 
at once that no mother under such circumstances 
could have uttered the stately words: ‘‘Son, why 
hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father 
and I sought thee sorrowing.’’ We must permit 
Luke, who is so gifted with sympathetic accuracy, 
to put into English what he so well wrote in 
Greek. Then we shall read: ‘‘Child, why did you 
do us so? Behold thy father and I, too, anxiously 
are seeking thee.’’ Thus we can see the astonish- 
ment, the reproach, the grieved authority and the 
sustained pain of the anxiety, for she uses the 
present tense. They had come upon Him and now 
knew He was found, but not yet have they been 
able to dismiss the feeling—still ‘‘we are seeking 
thee.’? How very natural. Yes, and how it is His 
turn for grief and even for rebuke. ‘‘ Why is it 
that ye were seeking for me? Did ye not know 
that I must be in the midst of My Father’s 
affairs?’?’ Why had they not come at once to the 
house of His Father, to the temple? What had 
become of their knowledge of His ways, their trust 
in His conduct and capacity? Why beat blindly 
about alleys and side-streets? Why go in wild ex- 
citement into out-of-the-way places seeking for 
Him when He had established His competence and 
conscientiousness long ago? ‘‘Did you not know 
that I must be here in the temple where, just now, 
My Father’s affairs call loudest for me?’’ To be 
distrusted is one of the sorest griefs and one of 
the most discouraging wrongs of childhood. 

2. Jesus expresses here a definite sense of high 
obligation. ‘‘I must be in My Father’s affairs.’’ 

20 


THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS 


When an outward shall is matched by an inward 
must we have loyal and true obedience. When the 
inner soul senses perfectly the will of God and 
appropriates that will with intellectual approval 
and emotional enthusiasm we have duty glorified 
in holiness. ‘‘The law of the spirit of life in 
Christ Jesus frees us from the law of sin and 
death,’’ because the will of God becomes the law 
of our nature. Paul tells us, in Phil. 2: 12-13, that 
the complete working out of our salvation brings 
us to the condition where we will and do that 
which is well pleasing to God. Jesus was to learn 
obedience by the things which He suffered (Heb. 
5:8). Already He has the first principles. The 
human obedience in a strict Jewish home had its 
meaning for Him. He is not afraid now to say 
**T must.’’? That idea will bulk large in the mo- 
tives of His activities in the public years of His 
life. The poles of His sense and rule of duty 
are in His own personality and in God, His 
Father. He must maintain the integrity and 
unity of Himself. Hence what His judgment pro- 
nounces right His conscience executes as an irre- 
sistible imperative. He must. It is good to hear 
Him say it asa Boy. It will be good to hear Him 
say it in the heat of the height of His ministry. 
It will be supreme to hear Him say it in Geth- 
semane, from which He moves on to Calvary, to 
Olivet, to ‘‘the right hand of the majesty on high.’’ 

3. His words in this primary sentence reveal 
Jesus as already devoted to religion and worship, 
to the word of God and the house of God. Later, 
even as now, the work of God will be His one con- 

21 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


cern. It was among ‘‘the doctors of the Law’’ 
that He was speaking. Among them He has been 
for days. He was hearing them discuss, and dis- 
cussing with them, the word of God in the Old 
Testament. That word is ‘‘the man of His coun- 
sel.’”’ ‘‘The courts of the Lord’s house’’ are 
sought by His willing feet. He grounds His life 
on the scriptures and on His consciousness of God. 
These two factors will appear in all His teaching 
and doing. It is instructive to find them so evi- 
dent in this first scene of His conscious life, the 
first expression of the quality and direction of His 
soul. 

4. The most surprising feature of these words 
lies in the revelation they make of the conscious- 
ness in Jesus of a unique relation to God as His 
Father. We may not undertake to affirm fully and 
exactly what these words meant to Jesus; but we 
cannot be true to history or psychology if we at- 
tribute to them any meaning short of the expres- 
sion of spiritual sonship unto God, as He now con- 
ceives God. 

His words inevitably contrast with Mary’s say- 
ing ‘‘thy father and I seek thee.’’ It is not so 
much that He will contrast their claims on Him 
with His freedom to respond to the claims of His 
spiritual, heavenly Father. He does place obedi- 
ence to the heavenly Father in first place for con- 
trolling conduct. Duty to God will inelude rightly 
defined obedience to earthly parents. He went 
home with them again as formerly, and ‘‘was 
subject to them’’ as became a true and dutiful son; 
but beyond and through all that obedience was 

22 


THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS 


the call of the heavenly Father and the response 
of the spiritual Son; and if conflict should come— 
as come it might—the relation to the Father-God 
must prevail. Yet the smug arrogance of a con- 
ceited religious pride that would repudiate human 
obligation to parents by the pious ‘‘Corban’’ of 
mock devotion Jesus will be able twenty years 
later to denounce with a clear conscience. He 
knows how to make the heavenly Father supreme. 
and definitive without repudiating human rela- 
tionship or shirking any duty. 

We must go deeper into His God-consciousness,, 
however, if we are to understand Jesus calling’ 
God His Father in this connection. The daring of 
it, the wonder of it, the sheer audacity, have not,, 
apparently, been much appreciated. 

One must inquire first of all where He learned 
thus to use such a phrase; and then how He dared 
do so. He had never heard it so used in temple, 
synagogue or home. He had never met it in this 
direct, open, frank use in any Old Testament 
passage. A detailed study of the fourteen ex- 
amples in His Scriptures of references to God as 
Father will not show a single case of an individual 
worshiper, however devout and however gifted 
with the insight of prophetic understanding, 
speaking in definite, personal directness of God 
as his Father. Jesus not only does this, but goes 
further and announces this relation of Father and 
Son between Him and His God as the determina- 
tive fact of His consciousness and conduct. 

We may say, if we think so, that He is applying 
to Himself the striking words of the second 

23 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


psalm: ‘‘Thou art my Son; this day have I be- 
gotten Thee’’; and the words of Isa. 9:6, ‘‘For 
unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given, 
ete.’’ But if we explain His words in this way we 
must be prepared to accept the conclusions that 
follow. No prophet or saint had ever thus appro- 
priated these expressions. If this lad of twelve is 
doing this, he is either on the way to an intolerable 
insanity of spiritual pride or He is expressing a 
consciousness which if justified in humility, right- 
eousness, service and fellowship with this Father 
must mark Him as God’s Son in a sense attained 
by none other and possible to none else. 

We know in how godly and pious a home He 
had grown up. We know how familiar was Mary 
with her Bible. There He had come to love, to 
learn by rote, to read, to ponder the messages in 
God’s word. In the synagogue every Sabbath 
and latterly in the day schools that word had been 
read and expounded in His hearing. In the temple 
He had seen it symbolized, had heard the psalms 
sung in wonderful choruses and by antiphonal 
choirs. But here He is saying something never 
heard before. His thought of God is original. We 
have become so familiar, under His lead and 
teaching, with the Father idea of God, and have 
gained such boldness of approach in that Name 
that it requires an effort for us to appreciate how 
strange, how wonderful, how significant this term 
for God was upon the lips of the lad, Jesus. 

God was so ‘‘high and exalted’’ that the Jews 
feared to call His covenant name, Jehovah, and 
lest they speak it ‘‘in vain’’ they rarely spoke 

24 


THE FIRST RECORDED WORDS OF JESUS 


it at all. They sought priests, sanctified and 
cleansed, to approach even the mercy seat of God 
in their behalf. In such an environment, under 
such instructions this Boy, standing in some room 
of that Holy Temple of Jehovah, speaks of Him 
as Father as if that were quite the normal thing 
to do. What shall we say of these words as re- 
vealing what Jesus thought of Himself? It is in 
the same way He will speak and think of God in 
manhood, ministry and mission. Must we not 
reverently bow before Him as in His first recorded 
word to us He brings the Message: ‘‘God is My 
Father; 1 am God’s Son.”’ 


25 


CHAPTER II 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE: TO FULFILL ALL. 
RIGHTEOUSNESS (Matt. 3:18-17; Luke 3: 21-22) 


There are eighteen years from the first words 
from Jesus until we are permitted again to hear 
Him speak or to have any specific statement con- 
cerning Him. ‘‘The silent years’’ the commenta- 
tors call them. They were years of private life 
and growth. That fact is significant. How could 
a youth so gifted, so extraordinary, so likely to 
produce a sensation, remain quiet until He was 
thirty years old? What possibilities there were 
of applause, of usefulness as a ‘‘boy preacher,’’ 
a youthful ‘‘prophet,’’ a prodigy! With the pe- 
culiar consciousness of God manifest in the child 
how could He be restrained or restrain Himself 
when there was so much need everywhere for His 
insight and His message? ‘There is something 
suggestive of what is more than humanly modest 
and wise in the reticence of Jesus. 

How often one meets the comment that we know 
nothing of Jesus for all these adolescent and grow- 
ing years. All of us have shared the wish that we 
might know what He did, how He occupied Him- 
self and developed into that Man we meet in the 
Gospels. Tradition could not overlook so fruitful 
a field. But the stories reveal the lack of under- 
standing of their Subject. They are all out of 

26 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE 


character. They lay hold on the supernatural and 
produce incidents that contradict the reticence 
which marks Him in this period. The acts attrib- 
uted to Him are not only out of character, and con- 
tradict John’s statement that He began miracle 
working at Cana in Galilee (John 2:11); they are 
such as would inevitably have destroyed His 
silence and thrust Him ‘‘willy-nilly’’ into a pub- 
lic career. 

Yet we are not without material to guide a 
reverent, constructive imagination in producing 
what must be a true picture of outstanding fea- 
tures of ‘‘the silent years.’’ Facts we may 
largely—but not wholly—lack; truth we may 
have. 

We have two fruitful phrases to guide us as we 
undertake to follow the Boy into His years of 
silent self-realization. 

1. We know that He has a conviction of a rela- 
tion to God such as no man had claimed or has 
since claimed, and that this way of thinking of God 
as His Father was the controlling factor in His 
thought and His conduct. Here then will be the 
center of personal interpretation and growth. 
For we find this the dominant note of His thought 
of Himself and of humanity when He comes to 
teach and preach and heal. He will, then, all these 
years be learning and expanding the meaning of 
having God for Father and of being, in Himself 
and for other men, the Son of God. Always He 
will be occupied with His Father’s affairs. 

2. And we have Luke’s inspired testimony that 
He cut his way ahead intellectually (in wisdom), 

27 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


physically (in stature), spiritually (in favor or 
grace) both in religious relation (with God) and 
in social coordination (with men). These two 
sentences yield us a rich fund of information if 
we analyze them and then study their outcome in 
the mature Messiah envisaged in the Gospel pic- 
ture. We shall greatly err and miss much in our 
understanding of Jesus if we do not allow full 
force to Luke’s statement that ‘‘He forged His 
way ahead.’’ That means problems, hindrances, 
difficulties, opposition; and toil, labor, pains, per- 
sistence; and loyalty to an ideal ever more clearly 
defining itself. He was naturally extraordinary; 
He achieved distinction and uniqueness. We may 
add yet other items to enlarge our material. 

3. We know that the Hebrew Bible, both in the 
original Hebrew and in the Greek (Septuagint) 
translation, is to be the basis of all His study. 
If at twelve He had an amazing knowledge of it 
and had begun already to approach it not merely 
as a learner of its traditional interpretations, but 
with questions that sought out new meanings and 
fresh interpretations, what joy and painstaking 
care He will expend in all these years in digging 
deep into Law and Prophet and Psalm. Days and 
months and years He delves into these Scriptures. 
He finds in them His ideal self, His Father’s na- 
ture and plans, His own purpose and program and 
method. Every word of it seems known to Him in 
the open years. Weare all too apt to assume that 
He knew His Bible ‘‘naturally.’’ But we mistake 
when we so think. He could ‘‘find the place’’ in 
Isaiah which He would use for text in His home- 

28 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE 


coming sermon at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30) be- 
cause He was familiar with its location and its 
look in the scroll by reason of much handling of it. 
He was Master of His Bible and could handle it 
with a freedom and originality and discrimination 
that aroused the greatest interest and wonder be- 
cause He had worked so hard at it all these years. 
It came easy in later years because it came hard in 
earlier labors. And what came easy at last freed 
Him for what called for all energy in the present 
doing. 

4. Nor must we overlook the element of prayer 
in His growing years. The prayer life of His full 
years cannot have begun with the Baptism. Easy 
and normal access to the Father in prayer, nights 
of such prayer conference in crises of His min- 
istry, these are but the extension of a habit grown 
from childhood. The hills and rocks back of Naz- 
areth held trysting places of the Son on earth and 
the Father from Heaven. Many a problem had 
been solved in the night season there in the hills 
where He ‘‘entered His closet and shut the door’’ 
the while He wrought with God, and God wrought 
into Him. . 

5. And the school of life had for Him lessons 
rich and stern. 

He was ‘‘the carpenter’s son’’ and early his 
apprentice as well, to become Himself the maker 
of tools and utensils, furniture and finishings for 
the simple houses of humble homes. He was 
learning to produce a new humanity and to recon- 
struct history while handling the tools in homely 
tasks for humble folk. 

29 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


It was no mere pastime of a student that occu- 
pied Him thus, not the recreational activity of one 
occupied with ‘‘intellectual and spiritual’’ studies 
and reflections. His avocation early necessarily 
became His vocation. 

The Gospels nowhere speak of Joseph as living 
during the ministry of Jesus. They do speak of 
Mary and of the members of the family in a way 
to confirm the tradition that Joseph died in the 
youth of Jesus. In the closing paragraph of the 
thirteenth chapter of Matthew (54 ff.), we have 
His four brothers named, James and Joseph and 
Simon and Judas, and of His sisters the neighbors 
say ‘‘are they not all with us?’’ The ‘‘all’’ speaks 
of at least three. Our knowledge of Jewish cus- 
tom enables us to infer that Mary was around 
twenty at the birth of Jesus. We must think of 
her left a widow when under forty with at least 
eight children. Jesus was probably between fifteen 
and eighteen. He became the head of the house- 
hold. In their moderate circumstances the struggle 
for physical necessities would be strenuous for the 
young carpenter. He accepted His lot and took up 
His burden. Nor did He lay it down until the fam- 
ily were all reared, at least to possible compe- 
tency. We can understand in this ight why, hu- 
manly speaking, He never attended any of the 
rabbinical schools at Jerusalem which had for Him 
such fascination as a lad of twelve. Of course we 
would say that there was no school that could 
have taught Him as He would learn. But no 
matter how eager He may have been for such 
schooling the opportunity was denied Him. He 

80 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE 


had to work hard, early and late, to make ends 
meet in that crowded cottage. Indirectly He must 
learn what the schools taught, and He certainly 
knew when He came to meet their pupils and 
teachers in later years. 

How serious were the conferences Jesus and 
Mary held at night over the needs of the family, 
the food and raiment and drink concerning which 
He will later tell us not to worry. These must be 
found in sufficient measure for growing boys and 
girls. And there were other problems more seri- 
ous: education and morals and religion. How 
shall they be solved for the worthy bringing up 
of this big family? And we may be sure these 
boys, so near His own age, were not easy for Jesus 
to manage, or to get on with at all. His superior- 
ity would as often nettle and ‘‘rile’’ them as com- 
mand admiration and deference. Six months be- 
fore His crucifixion they taunted His pretensions 
and challenged Him to go on to Jerusalem and 
publish His claims so as to have the crisis over, 
one way or another. This was far from being the 
first time they had failed to appreciate Him. 

What intimacies of soul He and Mary had in 
planning and praying together, often after all the 
children were abed. How blest the widow with 
such a Son! How high the challenge to every son 
similarly placed! How much it meant to Him to 
be schooled in such providences as these as He 
‘‘learned obedience’’ and ‘‘sympathy’’ ‘‘by the 
things He experienced.’’ 

We can understand, again humanly speaking, 
why Jesus did not begin His ministry until He 

31 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


was thirty years old. To be sure, His ministry 
must wait on that of John; but the Holy Spirit was 
controlling and timing both. Jesus must first 
finish the task in Nazareth. 

At length that task was complete. He could lay 
upon other shoulders all the home burdens. Pal- 
estine is athrill with the sensation of the New 
Prophet of the Hills, the Evangelist of the Jordan. 
Not for four hundred years has one so spoken for 
the living God. Every community is stirred. It 
is all the talk. No hamlet is unmoved. From 
every section companies are forming for pilgrim- 
age down to the great camp meetings in the Jer- 
icho valley. Some have returned to Nazareth and 
tell in excited tones to awed throngs of the won- 
derful preacher and his burning message: ‘‘The 
day of the Lord is at hand.”’ 

I think Mary noticed a strange light in the eye 
of her First-born. There was a far-away air 
about Him, as if He felt in His soul the call to a 
new career. He was more than usually reticent. 
He spent more time out in the hills alone. Hach 
morning He took with Him to the little shop a 
‘‘roll of the Book.’? From it He would read a 
bit, then lay it upon a shelf while He worked and 
thought; then read again, and turn almost absent- 
mindedly to work again. All this Mary’s keen, 
discerning eye saw. There was nothing for her to 
say. Then there came an evening when she noted 
that He carefully put away His tools, swept the 
shop out all clean and shut the door with a care 
that spelled finality. He came into the house and 
laid up His scroll and went out into the solitude of 

82 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE 


the night. When late into the night He still did 
not come, Mary went and got the scroll to see what 
He had been reading. Her eyes fell on the words 
in what we call the Fortieth Psalm: 


‘Sacrifice and offering thou hast no delight in; 

Mine ears hast thou opened: 

Burnt-offering and sin-offering hast thou not 
required. 

Then said I, Lo, I am come; 

In the roll of the Book it is prescribed for me: 

I delight to do thy will, O my God; 

Yea, thy Law is written in my heart. 

I have proclaimed [have to proclaim] glad 
tidings of righteousness in the great 
assembly ; 

Lo, I will not refrain my lips, 

O Jehovah, thou knowest. 

I have not hid thy righteousness within my 
heart; 

T have declared thy faithfulness and thy sal- 
vation; 

I have not concealed thy lovingkindness and 
thy truth from the great assembly’’ (vv. 
6-10, cf. Heb. 10: 5 ff.) 


Mary could not think of sleep. She got together 
a ‘‘change of raiment’’ and prepared a simple 
lunch, all of which she made into a neat packet. 
Then she got ready a simple breakfast. In the 
morning twilight she saw Him coming in from 
His night with that Father about whose affairs it 
is needful for Him to be. Mary met Him, very 

33 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


quietly, and led Him to the waiting breakfast. 
As they sat and He ate she watched Him furtively, 
lovingly, longingly. They did not talk much. 
Rather they felt each other and mingled their 
souls in spiritual converse and questioning. As 
He finished Mary went and brought out the packet, 
and handed it to Him. She helped Him adjust 
it, thus to touch Him with her hands in gentle 
caress. A moment they gazed into the deeps of 
each other’s eyes. Very gently He placed His 
arm about her, drew her to Him as they stood 
together there in the doorway, planted a kiss on 
her upturned face. No word was spoken. He 
turned about, walked past the little shop, followed 
the path as it wound eastward and south and then, 
more than a quarter of a mile below, passed 
around the point out of sight into the highway 
leading down to Judea and the Jordan. Mary 
turned into her house with a great surge of min- 
gled feeling and fell on her face on His bed. She 
knew that her wonderful Son had gone out into the 
world to do His work, to attend to the affairs of 
His Father. There are some of us who know, as 
far as we humans may know, what it means to a 
young man thus to go out from the home, and 
who know also what it means to the mother’s heart 
and the father’s soul to see them go. O God, that 
we may know that they go out to follow Him, ‘‘to 
do the will of God’’! 

Two days later through the throngs about the 
Baptizing Prophet came a serious, modest Man 
and asked to be baptized. With emphasis that 
marks astonishment and determination John de- 
murs: ‘‘I have need to be baptized by Thee, and 

34 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE 


Thou, dost Thou come unto me?’’ Jesus said in 
reply: ‘‘Allow it in this instance; for thus is it 
fitting to fulfill all righteousness.’’ Then John 
yielded and baptized Him. Immediately upon 
being baptized Jesus prayed. In response to that 
prayer there came, for Him and John, at least, a 
vision of heaven opened and the Holy Spirit in 
bodily form like a dove coming down and alighting 
on Jesus to abide; and a voice that said: ‘‘This is 
My Son, the Beloved, in whom I am pleased.’’ 

Let us not be disturbed by the superficial incon- 
sistency between John’s protest against baptizing 
Jesus and his own statement (John 1: 31-34) that 
the Messiah was unknown to him, and was recog- 
nized in the manifestation of the Spirit and the 
Voice. John does not say that he did not know 
Jesus, the Man; but that he did not know the 
Christ, the Redeemer, anointed of God. He de- 
clared that He was already in the midst of the 
people and to be manifested. John and Jesus 
were kinsmen and their mothers intimate friends, 
sharing their transcendent secrets of God’s grace 
in their sons. John was probably left an orphan. 
That he ‘‘was in the deserts until the day of his 
showing unto Israel’? (Luke 1:80) does not mean 
that he never mingled at all with people. The 
one home in all the land to which he would go 
would be the carpenter home in Nazareth. He 
and Jesus had too much in common not to know 
each other and to talk together of the things of 
God. 

John was preaching repentance, sternly as well 
as graciously calling on men to confess their sins 
and turn unto the coming kingdom of God. His 

35 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


baptism was the symbolic embodying of that re- 
pentance and the washing away of the sins of the 
man who accepted it. 

He did not know that Jesus was the Christ. He 
may have suspected it. He did know Him as the 
cleanest, purest, godliest man his eyes had looked 
upon. So he drew back from Jesus, declaring: 
“You are a far better man than I. As between 
You'and me You must be my confessor and wash 
away my sins.’’ Jesus’ reply is: ‘‘I am not com- 
ing in repentance; not asking you to hear a con- 
fession. [I am asking that you baptize Me in dedi- 
cation of Myself to My life-purpose.’? On that 
basis John agreed and the baptism was per- 
formed. 

Now in all this there stand out certain important 
features. | 

1. Jesus calmly assumes the direction of John. 
Here is a modest, obscure young artisan standing 
before the man before whom multitudes from all 
corners of the land quailed and hid their faces in 
confusion over sin. Here is the greatest preacher 
Israel has known since the Captivity, the first 
prophet in hundreds of years, the man who re- 
buked kings and denounced the sins of the priests 
of God. The young Carpenter quietly directs the 
prophet’s course; the prophet owns the command 
and obeys. Truly ‘‘one greater than John the 
Baptist is here.’’ 

2. We have said Jesus was baptized in dedica- 
tion of Himself to His life-purpose. That purpose 
has long been forming and defining itself in His 
thinking and planning. Now it is clear, definite, 

36 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE 


certain. It has been wrought out in His Bible 
studies which it is easy to see centered in the 
ereat spiritual passages of the Law of Moses, in 
the Messianic Psalms, and preéminently in the 
Prophets, especially in Isaiah’s visions of the 
Messianic reign and ‘‘the songs of the suffering 
servant of Jehovah.’’ 

The purpose has been defined in periods of 
meditation prolonged and profound,.in nights of 
prayer, communion and counsel with God, His 
Father. 

That purpose is part*of His peculiar and now 
perfect God-consciousness. 

He dedicates Himself to it wholly, unreservedly, 
and to all its implications and obligations. For 
this He buries in the past all His sacred secular 
tasks. No more can they claim Him or assert any 
claim upon Him. 

Hear Him state the purpose to which He is now 
committed in the water symbol of death and resur- 
rection: ‘‘It is fitting to fulfill all righteousness.’’ 
Nothing higher, holier, more comprehensive, more 
costly, could be conceived. He does not propose to 
be a good man, merely, noble as that is. Nor to 
do righteousness, important as that is. Nor will 
He be content to live cleanly, righteously and gen- 
erously, fine as that ideal is for any man. For 
Him there is no objective short of fulfilling ‘‘every 
aspect of righteousness.’’ That means, must 
mean in the light of His words and His life, that 
He sets Himself to do all that the Father-God of 
His consciousness, the Holy and Righteous One of 
Israel’s revelation, has in purpose and power to 

37 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


do in the human race. He will do as a man all the 
righteousness that one man can do in His rela- 
tions. But that is only the beginning, only the 
personal condition of the purpose before Him. 
If He succeeds the will of God will be done on 
earth as it is in heaven and His Father’s name will 
be hallowed in all the earth. Such is the purpose 
with which He went into the Jordan. 

He goes to John because John links up His new 
work with God’s work in the former order of Is- 
rael and with the Covenant. He will carry to the 
full all that God has begun in the ages past. 
God’s purpose is unchanging, His work continu- 
ous. There can be no real break with the past, 
even when a new era is inaugurated. 

3. Jesus has no delusions about the task He 
is undertaking. He knows enough of human na- — 
ture and of history to see what He is facing. Yet 
‘‘He will not fail nor be discouraged till He have 
set justice in the earth’’ (Isa. 42:4). Thatis why 
He enters His work through the baptism in the 
Jordan. ‘‘Thus it becometh us to fulfill all right- 
eousness’’—ottas, in this manner. He knows 
that to realize such a high purpose He must raise 
a dead humanity to life. And He knows that at 
the other end of His personal ministry there will 
be another burial with its resurrection. He com- 
mits Himself to it all. The temple of righteous- 
ness He will build will have its corner stone laid in 
an emptied grave. It is no mechanical plan He 
projects, but a task of remaking personality per- 
ceived by an insight into the facts of humanity 
and an acceptance of all that the facts involve. 

38 


JESUS DECLARES HIS LIFE PURPOSE 


4, The scene closes with the seal of divine ap- 
proval. Not alone will Jesus undertake so tran- 
scendent a task. Fully convinced and fully dedi- 
cated as He is, He falls on His knees at the water’s 
edge in prayer. The response is quick and won- 
derful. Heaven opens for the Spirit of Deity to 
join Him. Together they will work for this high 
goal, even as the Prophet foretold (see Isa. 
42:1 ff., 61:1ff., 48:16, etc.). And the voice of 
the Father spoke to the spirit of His Son in ap- 
proval of His purpose and of His dedication to 
it: ‘‘Thou art my Son, the Beloved, in Thee I am 
pleased.’’ (See Luke 38: 22.) 

Thus the story of the Baptism of Jesus. What 
can we make of it? What but to accept it, to own 
Him, to follow Him. No man could have invented 
this scene. Unmistakably it aims to portray the 
presence of deity in humanity undertaking, in 
complete divine energy, to realize divine right- 
eousness on earth. The marvelous combination of 
ideas and aims and method could never have come 
to any man unless he had seen them set before the 
eyes of his soul in living Personality. 

One other word we cannot forbear. We all have 
our life aim and purpose, more or less distinct, 
more or less compelling, more or less absorbing. 
Are we ready to bury all in baptism into that pur- 
pose? Can we hear the God and Father say to 
us as we commit ourselves to our purpose: ‘‘ Thou 
art my child; I love thee; I approve of thee and 
of thy purpose’’? Can any one of us go on in life 
unless he can have a purpose on which that bless- 
ing of God rests? 

39 


CHAPTER III 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS: JESUS REVEALS HIS 
PRINCIPLES oF conpucT (Matt. 4:1-11, Mark 
1:12f., Luke 4:1-14) 


A great Life Ideal is not in itself sufficient to 
produce a great life. The great ideal is essential 
for the great life; but is not all-sufficient for it. 

Jesus had a clear consciousness of His unique 
relation to God. He is the one Son of the infinite 
Father. He has a clearly defined and firmly fixed 
purpose ‘‘to fulfill all righteousness.’’ With this 
consciousness and this purpose He went to His 
baptism. In that baptism He buried all His sec- 
ular, private and family life and responsibilities 
and arose to be the Servant of Jehovah to fulfill 
the world mission, the universal function for 
which He ‘‘had become flesh to dwell among 
men.’’ No sin did He leave behind, for He had 
none. Yet even He must make the definite break 
with the former life and the definite committal 
wholly to His Messianic Calling. 

This Great Consecration was quickly followed 
by the Great Temptation. It is always so. One 
is never permitted to go unhindered into a life of 
consecrated service of God and men. The con- 
secration of Jesus had been marked by the bap- 
tism, the prayer, the Holy Spirit, the approving 

40 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


Voice. Then immediately follows the forty days 
of temptation. 

There are some general considerations about 
these temptations through which we must ap- 
proach any analysis of them. 

1. First of all we face the question of the possi- 
bility and the reality of Jesus being tempted at 
all. It is no easy question. Indeed we shall do 
well frankly to confess at once that there are 
depths to it which we cannot fathom. How much, 
in truth, do we know of the metaphysics of any 
temptation? We know the dreadful fact in our- 
selves, and we can see and accept the fact in Jesus. 
In His case it was altogether inevitable. He could 
not be human and escape it. He could not be 
ideally human without temptation assailing Him 
with an intensity known to no other. In Him the 
issue was joined between sin and holiness, between 
righteousness and evil, between God and the 
devil. Satan knew how great was the issue. If 
he could get Jesus, by so much as one dimly dark- 
ening stain of sin, he could hold the world: if he 
failed with Jesus he must give up the world and 
surrender mankind to the grace of God in Christ 
Jesus. The older theologians gave much time and 
energy to discussing whether Jesus could or could 
not sin. The glorious fact that spells salvation 
and victory for us is that He could not sin. We 
may postpone the discussion of the proposition 
that He could not sin. He was not able to sin. 

2. It will help us to recall what preparation 
Jesus had for temptation and for resisting and 
overcoming it. We think first of His home train- 

41 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


ing. The spirit and ideals of the home; the in- 
struction and example of the home; the habits 
and standards all play a part in the set of the soul 
in relation to sin and in determining how it will 
react to temptation. Habits of obedience under 
the authority of the home helped. Restraints and 
constraints of control of an immature, growing 
personality can alone give the sense of authority 
and responsibility on the basis of which one may 
become morally and righteously autonomous. 
Without the teaching and the learning of author- 
ity self-will develops, but self-control is lacking. 
Modern pedagogical theory is defective—and 
often wholly deficient—at this point. To allow 
only self-expression in the child, under a guid- 
ance that avoids all exercise of authoritative con- 
trol, is to deprive the child of the knowledge of the 
principle of obedience. And without that knowl- 
edge the child is doomed to develop into a self- 
willed, selfish, domineering adult, or else to be 
broken and baffled and destroyed in the conflict 
with the authority of nature and the cosmic order 
which are enforced upon us all, whatever our 
theories. 

Jesus learned obedience and set up in His own 
soul the perfect command of God. The conscious- 
ness of God in His life and in all the world in- 
fluenced Jesus. He gave Himself up to this. 
He lived in God and God lived in Him. He hid 
God’s word in His heart that He might not sin 
against God’s law (cf. Ps. 119:11). He met every 
temptation with an instantly recalled text from 
His Bible. And so He was able to do always in 

42 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


the multiform situations that met Him in a busy 
ministry. These texts did not ‘‘just come to Him 
naturally.”? They came because He had stored 
mind and heart with them in the memory days of 
childhood, had matured their meaning in the 
meditative days of young manhood, had related 
them to practical duties in the stern demands of 
living contacts with men. 

We must keep in mind, too, that He was a man 
of prayer. Between His baptism and the wilder- 
ness He slipped in a praying hour. That was 
the normal way with Him. 

And all is crowned by the leadership of the 
Holy Spirit. The Spirit had come to abide upon 
Him. It is surely on first thought startling, even 
shocking, that the first influence of the Holy Spirit 
is to ‘‘lead Him into the wilderness to be tempted 
of the devil.’’ Mark’s language here is very 
strong: ‘‘And straightway the Spirit driveth Him 
forth into the wilderness.’’ It was a terrible ex- 
perience. We get the echo of it when Jesus comes 
to teach us to pray, ‘‘Lead us not into tempta- 
tion,’’? and when He exhorts His disciples: 
‘‘Watch and pray that ye enter not into tempta- 
tion.’’ No other man was ever so seriously, so 
persistently, so subtly beset by Satan. There is 
infinite significance in Luke’s being able to say 
(4:13-14): ‘‘And when the devil ‘had finished 
every temptation he departed from Him for 
(until) a season. And Jesus returned in the 
power of the Spirit into Galilee.’’ Because He 
met temptation in the control of the Spirit He 
could minister to men in the power of the Spirit. 

43 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


3. A word needs now to be spoken of the purpose 
of the temptation, and of its value. Already we 
have indicated that it is part of the discipline by 
which Jesus was perfected in Saviorhood by the 
experiences which He suffered. We may not com- 
prehend the fact that He could not ‘‘be made in all 
things like unto His brethren’’ without growing 
into the complete mastery of our conditions by 
coming up through them. We can at least see 
that ‘‘being tempted in all points like as we are’’ 
enabled Him to ‘‘become a merciful and faithful 
High Priest in things pertaining unto God, to 
make propitiation for the sins of the people’’ 
(Heb. 2:17-18), because He would thus be able 
to ‘‘bear gently with the ignorant and erring.’’ 
His experience of our limitations and struggles 
illuminates the Psalmist’s assurance that ‘‘God 
knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are 
dust.’’? ‘‘For in that He Himself hath suffered 
being tempted, He is able to succor them that 
are tempted.’’ We may ‘‘therefore draw near 
with boldness unto the throne of grace, that we 
may receive mercy, and may find grace to help in 
time of need’’ (Heb. 4:16). 

When we think of the temptations as a part of 
Jesus’ own experience and life their significance 
lies in their giving Him occasion to fix and declare 
the principles of conduct. No life can be lived 
consistently unless grounded in and always moti- 
vated by inviolable principles. No man can be 
always honest unless truth is imbedded ‘‘in the 
inward parts.’’ A sudden, unanticipated opportu- 
nity to gain wealth by dishonesty, or a sudden 

44 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


danger of losing by strict integrity, will plunge 
him into crooked dealing unless he has so fixed his 
rule of behavior that dishonesty is not in him. 

Will one ever lie in an emergency? Unless 
truth is an inviolable principle of character, and 
so an unfailing rule of conduct, in a crisis one will 
resort to falsehood. So of all sins. If we allow 
that we may ever commit them we certainly will 
fall into them. Jesus fixed all that at the start. 
Paul exhorts: ‘‘Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, 
and make no provision for the flesh, to do its long- 
ings’’ (Rom. 13:14). 

Most of our words and deeds are done by im- 
pulse. We do not, and cannot, anticipate them. 
We go forth in the morning never knowing what 
situations will face us calling for word and deed. 
There is no opportunity in most cases for reflec- 
tion, for weighing considerations. The religious 
and moral opportunist will say and do what the 
situation suggests as the easy, the pleasant, the 
profitable thing. The true man or woman will 
do right. Jesus was going forth to the most stren- 
uous, the most delicately trying, the most bitterly 
contested task that could engage a life. He car- 
ried into it the greatest and most important pur- 
pose that ever stirred a living soul. No mistakes 
of His can be corrected, compensated or atoned 
for. He must do right. He is not living for Him- 
self alone, but for all men. In a measure this is 
true of every one of us. 

The period of temptation was to fix for Him the 
goal He will seek—always; the interest that will 
control—always. There can be no faltering for 

45 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


Him, no vacillation, no compromise, no tem- 
porizing. That inner experience in which He 
faced Himself and fixed His personal relation to 
His task, to His powers, to His safety, to men and 
to devils, this is the great significance of the temp- 
tation. We cannot understand the temptation un- 
less we approach it with the understanding that 
Jesus is undertaking the role of Messiah, under- 
taking to fulfill God’s plan outlined in the deeper 
spiritual sections of the Old Testament, under- 
taking to fulfill all righteousness in a world 
where men are weak and proud, and sinful and 
lost. 

He has just received the Father’s approval. 
The Holy Spirit is linked with Him for service, 
but His acts are still to be His own. He has 
superhuman powers. No man save John the 
Baptist knows as yet that He is the Messiah. 
How shall He win this recognition? How will 
He use this superior power? These questions 
must be settled at once, and all that relates to 
them. 

We will not make the mistake of supposing that 
this one conflict ended His fight with Satan and 
temptation. ‘‘When he had tried every tempta- 
tion the devil left Him ‘for a season,’ ’’? we read 
in our versions. That suggests return and repe- 
tition. The Greek makes this definite, for it reads, 
not ‘‘for a season,’’ but ‘‘until an opportunity.’’ 
This was the decisive battle, but not the end of 
the war. Many ‘‘seasons’’ came. Indeed the 
temptations were almost continuous. The devil 
does not easily admit defeat. He never surren- 

46 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


ders. He kept up his attacks on Jesus all the way 
to the cross. He came in enemies, came in false 
friends and what is most dangerous to us all, he 
came in the true and loved friends. Even the 
Twelve, Peter preéminently, and the Mother be- 
loved and the brothers of Jesus were used as in- 
struments of temptation to Him. The poor and 
needy whom He loved and so longed to help 
tempted Him to turn aside from the high goal cf 
Messiahship and devote Himself to present relief 
and to material service. All this, and vastly more 
than we may pause here even to summarize, lay 
ahead of Jesus now that He begins to be the prom- 
ised, planned, and sorely needed Messiah, Servant 
of Jehovah, Redeemer of men. The wilderness 
days are testing days, principle-defining days. 

Nor will we mistake by thinking of only three 
temptations. These are but the strenuous on- 
slaught at the climax. ‘‘He was in the wilderness 
forty days undergoing temptation by the devil.’’ 
The whole period was a series of temptations. 

Let us see what we may make of the three su- 
preme tests recorded as marking the climax. 

1. ‘‘If thou art the Son of God, command this 
stone that it become a loaf of bread.’’ Jesus had 
just heard God call Him ‘‘My Son, the Beloved.’’ 
For eighteen years, at least, He has known that 
He is Son of God. Satan does not attack that. 
That is too much a matter of clear consciousness. 
The temptation is, not to question the relation to 
God, but to doubt God’s fairness in dealing with 
His Son. ‘‘He hungered and the devil said: ‘Use 
your power to make bread to feed yourself. It is 

47 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


> 99 


not right or just for God’s Son to be hungry. 
No doubt Jesus is conscious of miracle-working 
power now in Him ready for expression. How 
will He use it? It is suggested to Him that His 
first use of it will be to feed Himself. He has this 
power from His Father to be used in the service 
of men and in the work of the kingdom of heaven. 
If He can be made to use it in His own interest 
first of all, that power will be perverted from the 
start. The Son of God will then live, not as other 
men, but by special provision. He will be an ex- 
ception. He refuses, once and for all. He held 
this power as a gift sacred for service. He uses 
it, widely, lavishly, for men and for the glory of 
His Father, but never once for Himself. He will 
feed multitudes by the word of command, but will 
Himself eat no miracle food. He never evades 
hunger, thirst, weariness, distress, nor relieves it 
supernaturally in Himself. He settles that matter 
now at the first consciousness of the possession of 
this power, and when He is facing a real need, 
with hunger gnawing at His stomach. 

And He was facing just the temptation of every 
human being with any consciousness of power, 
in intellect, in genius, in possessions. Willi one 
use it to serve and advance self or will he hold 
it sacred for the service of men as a ministrant for 
God. 

2. When Jesus will not question the goodness 
and justice of His Father the temptation shifts to 
an appeal to ambition. It is not a crass appeal to 
a sordid ambition. It is quite in line with the 
ideals and aims in the heart of Jesus. Leading 

48 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


Him up to some height from which the wide vision 
could easily be made to suggest ‘‘all the inhabited 
earth,’’ the devil showed Him all the kingdoms 
of men and the glory of being their political head. 
He proposed at once to make Him the master of 
all the world if only Jesus would for once do 
obeisance before him. ‘‘If you do me that 
honor,’’ he said, ‘‘to Thee will I give this author- 
ity entire and their glory.’’ The word used does 
not need to mean ‘‘worship.’’ It means normally 
an act recognizing exalted personality or position 
and may be used as between men. It is used to 
describe Cornelius’ act of prostrate respect be- 
fore Peter (Acts 10:25). Satan knew that Jesus 
wished and expected to win the world. There was 
in the mind of Jesus at this time probably the 
pledge of the Second Psalm: 


‘‘T will tell of the decree: 
Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my son; 
This day have I begotten thee. 
Ask of me, and I will give thee the na- 
tions for thine inheritance, 
And the uttermost parts of the earth for 
thy possession.’’? (vv. 7-8.) 


In many other phrases and forms the Old Tes- 
tament bore this assurance to the Messianic Serv- 
ant of Jehovah. Jesus certainly means to take 
mankind for His field and to bring them into the 
kingdom of God as His goal. How will He do 
it? Where will He ever make a beginning? He 
has no reputation, no standing, no influence of 

49 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


position, no friends in power in any place to aid 
Him. He is contemplating spiritual methods, 
personal appeal, the attraction of ideals, of holi- 
ness, of personality. It is to be a slow process, 
and very difficult. The devil spoke with much of 
truth when he claimed the authority of human 
kingdoms and declared that to whomsoever he 
would he was in the habit of bestowing rulership. 
He will abdicate in favor of Jesus, and will 
actively aid in placing Him in authority on con- 
dition of Jesus recognizing this power and au- 
thority of the Evil One. He makes no mention 
now of God, leaving Him wholly out of the reck- 
oning. That is a favorite way with the devil, and 
one of our most common sins, just ignoring God 
and raising no question of His will, or of the prin- 
ciple of right and wrong. That is the greatest de- 
fect and sin of our generation—just acting as if 
God were not. 

But Jesus will not forget God. And He will not 
temporize or argue with the devil. Instantly, de- 
cisively, finally, He commands him to be off. 
‘‘Get behind, Satan: for it is written; As Lord 
thou shalt do obeisance to thy God, and to Him 
alone shalt thou give worship.’’ Satan offered 
Jesus the human race in mass to use for His own 
exaltation. Jesus sees them as multitudes need- 
ing Him, whom He must rescue and save and 
transform into a kingdom of heaven. He rejects 
the thought of regarding men as instruments of 
His own exaltation and glorification and insists on 
treating them as subjects of loving service. We 
may understand something of the nature of this 

50 


THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


temptation if we think of a German Prince who 
came to the throne forty years ago. To him the 
devil showed all the kingdoms of the world and 
their glory if he would bow to him, placing might 
in first place among the virtues of rulers, and the 
sword above the cross. The glamour of this glory 
dazzled the eyes and bedeviled the soul of Wil- 
helm. We know the mad pace it led him and the 
maelstrom of ruin in which it engulfed Europe 
and the world. And all the time the Kaiser was 
allowed to persuade himself he was a worshiper 
of God and a benefactor of men. And was not the 
German Kaiser just the supreme exhibition of the 
dominant spirit of nationalism and international 
standards? What a contrast Jesus presents. 
There in the wilderness He settled the way He 
would think of men. 

3. There remains yet one question. How shall 
men find out that Jesus is the Christ of God, the 
Hope of Israel, the Redeemer of prophecy, the 
Savior He longs to be and means to be? Where 
and how shall He proclaim Himself? A sugges- 
tion is ready. Select a feast day. The multitudes 
will be assembled in all the temple courts in the 
Holy City. John’s preaching has set tens of 
thousands thinking ‘‘the Day of Jehovah’’ is near, 
‘‘the Kingdom of God is at hand.’’ Now let Jesus 
ascend to the roof and suddenly, from one of the 
wings of that sacred building, float down into the 
midst of the crowds, God’s Servant arriving from 
the skies. It will all be easy. There can be no 
danger. God has promised to ‘‘give His angels 
charge concerning Thee, to guard Thee,’’ and 
| 51 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


‘‘On their hands they shall bear Thee up, 
Lest Thou dash Thy foot against a stone.”’ 


When the people see this His reputation will be 
instant. All will know He has come from God. 
By such spectacular short-cut Jesus may win a 
place and a following. How much easier and 
how much more speedily effective than the quiet, 
slow method of winning individuals by the truth 
and by personal influence. Here is a suggestion 
that Jesus take into His own hands the work of 
His ministry and place upon God the responsi- 
bility of backing Him up in His plans. The end 
is not affected. It is only the means that He is to 
determine for Himself. But Jesus will take God’s 
way to God’s ends. He will not seek to place God 
under obligation. The Son must do the Father’s 
work in the Father’s way. 


May we not now summarize the elements in 
these temptations and see how comprehensively 
they compass our own? ‘‘He was tempted in all 
points like as we are.’’? (1) He was tempted first 
to doubt God, then to ignore God, and finally to 
use God for plans that would be His own and not 
God’s. (2) There was first the temptation to 
satisfy a need—He was really hungry and His 
body must be nourished; then to gratify an am- 
bition—He wanted the world, and for good pur- 
poses of blessing and helpfulness: why not use 
the devil to get it?; lastly to display a possession 
—He could come down from the temple through 
the air safely, and it would deceive no man con- 

52 





THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


cerning His powers. (38) Self played a part in 
every temptation, as of necessity it always must. 
First He was asked to serve Himself with a power 
given for service and for the glory of God; then 
to make the kingdom of God a means for His own 
agerandizement, lastly to relieve Himself of toil 
and trouble, making His way easier when the true 
way was hard. (4) In the relation of the spir- 
itual and the material values He was first asked 
to make physical gratification the test of His life 
and not the soul’s relation to God and duty; then 
to materialize His conception of the Kingdom He 
would found, making it primarily political and 
not spiritual; and lastly to seek recognition by a 
physical miracle rather than by spiritual trans- 
formation of men. Here again we face the most 
common dangers in religion. At this moment 
throughout America there is raging a conflict of 
thought and debate as to the place of the physical 
miracle in the religion of Jesus. 


What, now, shall we find in the actual words 
of Jesus in the face of all these questions and sug- 
gestions? | 

1. ‘‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of 
God.’’ ‘‘A man’s life consisteth not in the things 
he possesseth.’’ A man can die, but the Son of 
God cannot ignore God’s word. He can die, He 
must not sin. ‘‘Is not the life more than the 
food?’’? The primary vice, on the religious side, 
in Christian Science is that its supreme test of 
faith and piety is found in the degree of comfort 

53 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


in the physical self. Jesus’ rule of conduct is: 
A child of God must make God’s will the sole 
guide in what he will do. ‘‘My food and my drink 
is to do the will of Him that sent me’’ is the way 
He phrases it for the Twelve at Jacob’s well. 

2. ‘*Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and 
Him only shall thou serve.’’ There can be no 
divided allegiance, no compromise with evil even 
as a means to a holy end. There can be no cor- 
rupting of the means that does not contaminate 
the result. Every act must be part of the worship 
of God. Jesus makes all this very clear, very em- 
phatic. He did not temporize, nor argue with 
Satan. There was no hesitation. ‘‘He who hesi- 
tates is lost.’? When we stop to parley with the 
devil we have already thus far surrendered to 
him. Jesus never betrayed a weak place in the 
armor of His resistance and so did not invite a 
second thrust in the same spot. And when the 
devil was done Jesus let Him go. There was no 
gloating, no spiritual pride. 

3. ‘*Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’’ 
Neither presumption nor doubt has any place in 
our dealing with the heavenly Father. We will 
trust Him so absolutely that there will be no test- 
ing of His word, but reliance on it at all times. 
There will be no taking control out of His hands 
and still expecting Him to rescue us from the dan- 
gers of our disbelief or of neglect of His counsel 
and will. 

Such were the principles with which Jesus came 
out of the wilderness, led by the Holy Spirit. His 
temptations had been desperate. They were per- 

5A 





THE TEMPTATION ANSWERS 


sonal, powerful, progressive, official, universal. 
They appeal to the physical, the psychological, the 
spiritual tendencies in His being. They involved 
His private life and character; His social ideal 
and human attitude; His divine relations. In the 
face of them all He came forth with the principles 
by which He lived and toiled, ‘‘enduring such con- 
tradiction of sinners against Himself,’’ ‘‘resist- 
ing unto blood striving against sin’’ (Heb. 
12:3f.). In the end He was able to say, as He 
faced His death: ‘‘The prince of this world 
cometh and he hath nothing in Me”’ (John 12: 31); 
‘‘HWather, I have glorified Thee in the earth, hav- 
ing finished the work which thou gavest Me to do”’ 
(John 17:4). 

Are we not bound to say, with the author of 
Hebrews, that this ‘‘Son, who learned obedience 
by the things which He suffered, and was made 
perfect, became unto all them that obey Him the 
author of eternal salvation’’ (Heb. 5: 8-9)? 


55 


CHAPTER IV 


THE HOME-COMING SERMON: DEFINING HIS RELATION 
TO MESSIANIC PROPHECY (Luke 4: 16-30) 


Jesus, apparently, returned from the period 
of temptation for two days with John the Baptist. 
Here He began privately to attract a personal 
following. His first two disciples were directed 
to Him by the Baptist. These brought others. 
Jesus won Philip. Soon He was returning to 
Galilee with a half dozen or more who already 
owned Him as Teacher, Friend, Messiah. 

From this small beginning His reputation 
spread, His popularity grew, His following multi- 
plied. At the wedding feast in Cana He made 
the first ‘‘beginning of signs’’ ‘‘and manifested 
His glory,’’ by reason of which in a new and 
deeper sense ‘‘His disciples believed on Him.”’ 

He attended a passover in Jerusalem where by 
cleansing the temple He raised an issue between 
Himself and the religious authorities. Nicodemus 
visited Him. His growing reputation was sur- 
passing that of John the Baptist. The jealousy 
and envy of the Pharisees was rising. He re- 
turns to Galilee through Samaria, where in a min- 
istry of two days many Samaritans believed on 
Him. 

Altogether some months have passed since that 
morning when He quietly said farewell to His 

56 





THE HOME-COMING SERMON 


home and shop in Nazareth and to Mary. In 
these months He had become famous. He was the 
most talked of man in all the land. He comes back 
home for a brief stay. The town was all a-buzz. 
The Carpenter who disappeared a few months be- 
fore has returned a Rabbi, and much more than 
a Rabbi. Cana was within fifteen miles, and a 
day’s journey would bring you to Capernaum, 
flourishing city by the beautiful blue Sea of 
Galilee, the center of His recent, as also of His 
future operations. All knew about Him, and 
wondered. Now He is back in the home town for 
a visit. 

It is the Sabbath. His custom from earliest 
days will take Him to the synagogue, the town 
meeting place for worship. He is now a teacher 
and a preacher. Of course He will preach. In- 
deed, it is known that of late He speaks in some 
synagogue practically every Sabbath day. The 
local ‘‘ruler of the synagogue’’ in all probability 
had invited Him to ‘‘take the service’’ for the 
day. However that may be, ‘‘He entered, as His 
custom was, into the synagogue on the Sabbath 
day, and took His stand to read.’’ Whether He 
had timed His visit so as to have the appointed 
‘‘lesson of the day’’ fit His purposes, or whether 
He had arranged with the attendant we cannot 
know. He had evidently deliberately chosen what 
scripture He would read and expound that day. 
There was handed to Him a small scroll contain- 
ing a part—probably not more than the Second 
Part and possibly not all even of that—of the 
writings of Isaiah. 

57 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


He found the passage He desired. It was our 
Chapter LXI. Luke identifies it for us by quoting 
what corresponds to our verse one and a clause 
in verse two. Whether the reading included more 
we may not say with certainty. The quotation in 
Luke breaks off in the midst of a sentence which 
continues through verse three and ends a para- 
graph. The last paragraph in the chapter (vv. 
10-11) fits perfectly the first paragraph from 
which Luke quotes: ‘‘I will greatly rejoice in 
Jehovah. My soul shall be joyful in my God: for 
He hath clothed me with the garments of salva- 
tion, He hath covered me with the robe of right- 
eousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with 
a garland, and as a bride adorneth herself with 
jewels. For as the earth bringeth forth its bud, 
and as the garden causeth the things that are 
sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord Jehovah 
will cause righteousness and praise to spring 
forth before all the nations.”’ 

It will at once be evident that this fits per- 
fectly with what Luke quotes, and all the more so 
if we quote the first paragraph in full. First, as 
Luke cites it for identifying the passage: ‘‘The 
Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon me; because 
He hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the 
poor; He hath sent me to bind up the broken- 
hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and 
the opening of the prison to them that are bound; 
to proclaim the year of Jehovah’s favor.’’ Here 
Luke breaks off. The paragraph continues: ‘‘and 
the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all 
that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in 

58 





THE HOME-COMING SERMON 


Zion, to give unto them a garland for ashes, the 
oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for 
the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called 
trees of righteousness, the planting of Jehovah, 
that He may be glorified.’’ 

Not only do the two paragraphs harmonize 
and complement each other, but the close of the 
second paragraph: ‘‘so the Lord Jehovah will 
cause righteousness and praise to spring forth be- 
fore all the nations,’’ would explain how Jesus 
came to speak of the widow of Zarephath, and of 
Naaman the Syrian, for which there seems no 
connection if we suppose that Jesus read only the 
part of a sentence which Luke quotes. And we 
have altogether a completer basis for the sermon 
of Jesus if we assume that He used all this. This 
fuller reading is not essential for the significance 
of the words of Jesus in applying the passage to 
Himself, although it gives a clearer applicability. 

There are several items in the application from 
which we see how Jesus was interpreting Him- 
self. 

1. Of initial significance is the appropriation 
by Jesus, for explaining Himself, of the most 
vital, exalted, spiritual predictions and descrip- 
tions of the Messiah. 

The case before us is but one example of such 
use of the Messianic Scriptures. This was a con- 
sistent element in His teaching, an established 
habit of His thinking concerning Himself. Here 
He frankly affirms: ‘‘To-day is this scripture ful- 
filled in your ears.’’ This was His opening state- 
ment. He returned the scroll from which He had 

59 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


read to the attendant; sat down, the customary 
attitude for a teaching rabbi, waited for perfect 
attention and expectant suspense until ‘‘the eyes 
of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him’’; then 
made this bold, tremendously significant state- 
ment. Luke’s record puts distinguishing em- 
phasis on this affirmation of Jesus that He brings 
the fulfillment of the prophecy, by giving no other 
item of the constructive teaching. Then he adds 
to the emphasis by reporting that Jesus tells them 
solemnly (‘‘verily’’) that He cannot expect from 
His neighbors’ acceptance of His functional 
office because ‘‘no prophet is acceptable in his 
native place.’? Jesus offends further by justify- 
ing His freedom in the interpretation and exer- 
cise of His function as Prophet by citing the 
sovereign will of God in sending His blessings 
through Elijah and Elisha to the widow of Zare- 
phath and to Naaman, the Syrian. He is thus as- 
serting His autonomy as Fulfiller of the Messianic 
prophecies, and His independence of popular wish 
and current expectation. The introduction of 
these heathen as the sole beneficiaries of grace in 
the instances cited by Jesus, as suggested above, 
was probably in connection with the prediction 
that ‘‘the nations’’ were to share His salvation 
(Isa, 60211). 

At first the audience were highly pleased and 
favorable, ‘‘bearing witness to Him, and wonder- 
ing at the words of grace which proceeded out 
of His mouth.’’ His reference to their wish that 
He do miracles for them must be in response to 
some such demand expressly made at the time. 

60 





THE HOME-COMING SERMON 


From this He goes on to the claim of authority 
and autonomy in Messianic functions and to the 
repudiation of their Jewish prejudices, all of 
which so angered them that they wished to destroy 
Him, and did form a mob and take Him to the 
precipice back of the town for that purpose. Such 
revulsion of feeling, such rage, such willingness 
to destroy Him can mean nothing short of their 
understanding Him to claim, and their resenting 
His claim of Messiahship and of an authority in 
interpreting the character and work of the Mes- 
siah such as ignored all established authority and 
convention. They would destroy Him as an arro- 
gant blasphemer. The universal note in His pro- 
gram would be the climax of offense. 

When John the Baptist from his prison sent to 
inguire of Jesus: ‘‘Art thou he that cometh, or 
look we for another?’’ Jesus sent, for reply, the 
story of what He was engaged in doing, and 
closed with the words: ‘‘And blessed is he who- 
soever shall find no occasion of stumbling in me.’’ 
John had been convinced that Jesus was the prom- 
ised Messiah. But Jesus’ ministry was not so 
stern nor marked with such judgments as John’s 
ideas expected. Hence his inquiry. Jesus evi- 
dently intends to say that He is the Messiah, and 
encourages John not to be disappointed in Him 
because John’s stern judgments are not being 
executed by Him. After John’s messengers are 
gone Jesus talks about him in praise and appre- 
ciation. He says of him: ‘‘This is he of whom it 
is written: ‘Behold I send my messenger before 
thy face, who shall prepare thy way before 

61 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


thee.’ ’’? But Jesus could not affirm that John was 
the forerunner of the Messiah without claiming 
that He was Himself that Messiah. In it all there 
is the assertion by Jesus of His right to interpret 
His function even in the face of John’s dis- 
appointed expectations. 

In the Old Testament Jesus found two aspects 
of the Messianic hope so different as easily to 
seem diverse and inconsistent. One stressed the 
material, political and economic prosperity and 
the influence and glory of Israel among the na- 
tions, usually’ grounding this on religious loyalty 
to Jehovah and including righteous and fraternal 
dealing both within the nation and with the na- 
tions. The other aspect emphasized holiness and 
truth; recognized the need for repentance, for- 
giveness, redemption, righteousness, was spiritual 
and transcended all racial lines. This latter ideal 
placed great importance on personal leadership 
and influence and made the ‘‘Servant of Jehovah’’ 
a sacrificial, atoning Savior of His own people and 
of other peoples as well. The first pledged to 
Israel glory and honor, the second placed on 
Israel moral and religious obligation and chal- 
lenged them to extending the blessings of their 
religious and ethical ideals. 

Jesus is in nothing more remarkable than in 
His choosing the ethical, religious, universal Mes- 
sianic type and forming His plan for His per- 
sonal ministry and His program for the King- 
dom of God, which He made all-important, on the 
basis of service and sacrifice. He would be the 
‘‘Suffering Servant of Jehoyah’’ ‘‘to redeem 

62 


THE HOME-COMING SERMON 


Israel and to be God’s salvation to the ends of the 
earth.’’ Hence His program was always aiming 
at inclusiveness, expansion, comprehensiveness, 
which met in the Jews a spirit of exclusiveness, 
self-assertion and differentiation. He precipi- 
tated that difference and conflict here in the Naza- 
reth sermon with the peasantry. This difference 
will extend and deepen among all classes until the 
conflict of these two ideals will reach the climax 
in the cross and Jesus will stake the decision of 
God on His power to overcome death imposed by 
the opposition. 

It would be quite impossible here to cite the 
numerous examples of this appropriation by Jesus 
of these spiritually Messianic teachings in the Old 
Testament. One or more of them is readily seen 
to underlie each crisis in the development of His 
ministry and each of His strategic teachings. He 
quotes them on most such occasions. His inter- 
preters, in the Gospels, follow His example and 
apply them to Him in their records. Here is one 
of the outstanding features of the Gospel story. 

2. There are two important features in the 
Messianic description and claim in the Sermon. 
The first is the ‘‘anointing of Jehovah’’ for the 
function of Messiah. Its significance lies in two 
directions: it gives authority for His function, 
and it provides equipment and divine coopera- 
tion in His work. ‘‘No man taketh the honor unto 
himself, but when he is called of God’’ (Heb. 5: 4). 
Jesus never tires of the idea that He is ‘‘sent”’ 
by His Father, that He is doing His Father’s 
works, speaking His Father’s words. This He 

63 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


does ‘‘always’’; it is His ‘‘food’’; ‘‘the Son can 
of Himself do nothing.’’ It is needless to multi- 
ply the statements. The Gospels abound in them, 
just as the idea that the Messiah was to be sent 
by Jehovah runs through all the Old Testament. 
The power of Jesus in great measure lay in just 
this unfailing conviction that He was ‘‘under 
authority.”’ 

But it was His claim also that ‘‘the promise of 
His Father’’ that the Holy Spirit should be with 
Him was realized in His ministry. Besides the 
words from which Jesus spoke in Nazareth we 
find the same assurance in Isa. 11:2: ‘‘And the 
Spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon Him, the spirit 
of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of knowl- 
edge and of the fear of Jehovah’’; in Isa. 42:1: 
‘Behold My Servant, whom I uphold; My chosen 
in whom my soul delighteth: I have put my Spirit 
upon Him: He will bring forth justice to the na- 
tions’’; in Isa. 48:16: ‘‘and now the Lord 
Jehovah hath sent me and His Spirit’’; in Isa. 
59: 20 f.: ‘And a redeemer will come to Zion .. . 
and this is My covenant with them, saith Jehovah; 
My Spirit which is upon Thee, and My words 
which [ have put in Thy mouth shall not depart 
out of Thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of Thy 
seed, nor out of the mouth of Thy seed’s seed, 
saith Jehovah, from henceforth and forever.”’ 

“That Jesus worked in the consciousness of this 
association with the Holy Spirit and in reliance 
upon Him is manifest from numerous references 
in His speech. We have seen already how the 
Holy Spirit came at His baptism ‘‘to abide upon 

64 


THE HOME-COMING SERMON 


Him’’; and that it was under the control of the 
Spirit that He went into the forty days of tempta- 
tion, and in the Spirit’s power that He came to 
Galilee to take up His ministry. It was ‘‘by the 
Spirit of God’’ that He cast out demons (Matt. 
12:28). He made His plans for the future of His 
Gospel and ‘‘gave commandment through the 
Holy Spirit unto the apostles whom He had 
chosen’? (Acts 1: 2-5) in the assurance that the 
Holy Spirit would unite with His apostles in wit- 
ness to Him and in carrying out His program. 
All this is set out with irresistible force in the 
Upper Room Talk—John 14-16. This linking 
Himself up with God and with God’s Holy Spirit 
is one of the unmistakable and inescapable char- 
acteristics of Jesus. 

3. The other impressive feature of the pro- 
phetic description of the Christ which Jesus ap- 
propriates, to identify Himself, is in the nature of 
His work. 

That work was, first of all, characterized by its 
interest in the poor, the broken-hearted, captives 
and prisoners, mourners and all in distress— 
descriptions which recall to our minds at once the 
seventy-second psalm and the Beatitudes of the. 
Sermon on the Mount, as also the description of 
His labors which Jesus commanded the messen- 
gers of John the Baptist to report to him. The 
nature of Jesus’ interpretation of this section of 
the prophetic word is indicated by the impression 
on the audience in the synagogue: ‘‘ And all bare 
witness, and wondered at the words of grace 
which proceeded out of His mouth.’’ 

65 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


A second item in the Isaiah passage was that a 
new era in God’s redemptive dealing with men 
was inaugurated by the coming of the Messiah. 
He was anointed ‘‘to proclaim the year of 
Jehovah’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our 
God.’’ This was an idea emphasized in other sec- 
tions of prophecy, e.g. Isa. 49: 8 (quoted by Paul in 
2 Cor. 6: 2). It was probably this claim of in- 
augurating a new era that first angered the au- 
dience, especially if He included the element of 
vengeance coupled with the idea of God’s favor. 
(Cf. also such passages as 2:12, 18:6, 34:2, 8.) 
It is in accord with this idea of God’s favor that 
the Isaiah passage in the last paragraph makes 
the Messiah rejoice in soul because He is ‘‘clothed 
with the garments of salvation’’ and ‘‘robed in 
righteousness.”’ 

A third item was the universalism of the work 
of the Christ through whom ‘‘the Lord Jehovah 
will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth 
before all nations.’’ The Christ is essentially of 
and for the human race. This necessity is part of 
the positive teaching, abundantly urged in the Old 
Testament, but wholly neglected in its deeper and 
vital aspects by the scribes of Jesus’ time. It is 
one of the marks of His insight, of His ‘‘keen 
scent for God’’ and His perfect human sympathy, 
that He received and emphasized this aspect of 
Messiahship. For Him there were no barriers of 
race, religion, culture, tradition, language. He 
‘‘came to save the world.’’ From the beginning 
He was the embodiment of the thought and pro- 
gram that ‘‘God so loved the world that He gave 

66 


THE HOME-COMING SERMON 


His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in 
Him should not perish but have eternal life.’’ 

Gathering out all the factors in the Messianic 
ideal that were spiritual, universal, sacrificial, He 
made them the ground plan of His life and aim. 
Thus would He reinterpret and realize ‘‘the Hope 
of Israel.’’ 


67 


CHAPTER V 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT—JESUS DECLARES HIS 
IDEALS FOR KINGDOM MEN (Matt. 4: 25-8:1) 


Probably somewhat more than a year after His 
baptism and some months after the Nazareth Dis- 
course Jesus takes a new step in His ministry. It 
is not necessary to suppose that all the material 
assembled in the Matthew section was spoken at 
one time. The weight of critical scholarship is 
against that view. Yet one ought not to overlook 
the unity and progress of the material, nor the 
pertinency of all of it to the occasion. The fact 
that some of the matter here recorded is, in other 
Gospels, assigned to other occasions would leave 
open the question of which is the accurate account, 
but quite obviously with the presumption against 
Matthew. Against that presumption we must still 
place the probability—the practical certainty— 
that Jesus, like every teacher, would give His 
vital and organic teaching more than once and 
under varying circumstances. Whether it was 
given entire, at the time of the choice of the 
Twelve (as Luke, see below), or whether it repre- 
sents Matthew’s assembling into unity materials 
' from various occasions, there is evident fitness 
in seeking to understand the aim and outline of 

68 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


this, the world’s most famous and influential 
‘<Discourse.’’ 

There was abundant reason for the Sermon. 

1. It has become urgently important that Jesus 
define His ideals and objectives. His ministry 
has become famous, never another so famous. Be- 
fore the imprisonment of John the Baptist, some 
months earlier than this sermon, Jesus was ‘‘mak- 
ing and baptizing more disciples than John’’ and 
that Great-heart had rejoiced to see his ‘‘Bride- 
groom-friend’’ ‘‘increasing’’? while his own 
standing ‘‘decreased.’? The ‘‘great Galilean 
ministry’’ has stimulated an enthusiastic popular- 
ity more embarrassing than gratifying, certainly 
raising many problems. Matthew’s summary 
statement (4: 23-25) enables us to appreciate the 
situation facing Jesus: ‘‘Jesus went about in all 
Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming 
the Good Tidings of the Kingdom, and healing all 
manner of disease and all manner of sickness 
among the people. And His reputation went 
abroad into the whole of Syria, and they brought 
to Him all those who were sick with various dis- 
eases and stricken with ills, demoniacs, epileptics 
and paralytics and He healed them. And there 
were following Him multitudinous crowds from 
Galilee and Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea 
and Transjordania.’’ Most of these numerous 
followers had but hazy notions of what He might 
mean to them. Such ideas as they had were apt to 
be more than half erroneous. 

For all who might be accounted ‘‘followers,’’ 
whether genuine or only quasz disciples, it was de- 

69 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


sirable that there be some clearing of their ideas. 
Jesus is asking men to follow Him. He must tell 
them whither and where He is leading. 

Then there were religious teachers, jealous and 
puzzled, for whom some defining word would be of 
use. The Jewish religious organization provided 
for the proper training and authorization of 
rabbis, scribes and synagogue rulers. Jesus held 
no certificate of any rabbinical school, no author- 
izing commission. Yet here He was teaching 
more people than all the rabbis and instructing 
more than all the scribes. Long ago they had 
provided from Jerusalem committees to watch 
His work and censor His words. He was quite 
too much for them either to control or to com- 
prehend with their minds grooved to convention- 
alism and limited by ‘‘the traditions of the 
elders.’’ Jesus will have a word for these jealous 
guardians of orthodoxy and regularity, these 
enemies of His freedom and directness. 

2. The time has come for some definite organi- 
zation of the results of His work. He has simply 
‘“gone about doing good,’’ teaching, healing, 
arousing, stimulating. He has seemed strangely 
careless of system. He has had almost no organi- 
zation. A few men have attached themselves to 
Him, responding to His attraction and to His in- 
vitation. They have accompanied Him on His 
tours and aided Himin many ways. Now the time 
has come to make some beginning of definite or- 
ganization. He will have Twelve who accept His 
headship and whom He may send out on such 
missions as His plans call for. All His future 

70 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


plans call for such organizations. He must begin 
definite training of these helpers—‘‘ Apostles’’ 
He will call them. He must induct them into His 
plans and program. There would be many possi- 
bilities from whom to make the choice. From 
Luke (6:12 ff.) we learn that ‘‘He went out into 
the mountain to pray; and He continued all night 
in prayer to God. And when it was day He called 
His disciples; and He chose from them twelve 
whom also He named apostles.’’ We are to think 
of Him as canvassing in that all-night conference 
with the Father numerous names. He could go 
over the qualities of the possibilities, considering 
each man in the light of His plans and of what 
He could hope to make of each one. They were 
not a very promising lot at best. They were to 
be of the very greatest importance to all that He 
is in the world for. 

When He came down in the morning He called 
them one by one from out the group of ‘‘disci- 
ples.’? By this time the multitudes were eagerly 
surging up the mountain and there on a ‘“‘level 
place,’’? on a bench of the mountain, in the pres- 
ence of the multitudes Jesus spoke at length, 
primarily to the newly designated T'welve, but 
also to all His followers and, consciously, to all 
the throng. 

3. He is outlining and discussing for them His 
Ideals for Men of the Kingdom of Heaven which 
He is preaching, inaugurating, projecting. It is 
important that we try to get just the topic He 
places before us here. He is not defining or de- 
scribing the nature of the Kingdom as a whole; 

71 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


not discussing the problems or the prospects, the 
methods or the growth or the consummation of the 
Kingdom. Of these He has some words—mainly 
in parables—on many occasions. Here He con- 
fines Himself to the characteristics which He de- 
sires, expects, and will cultivate in Kingdom folk. 
He is telling them what sort He will make of us 
and what He will do with us in His Kingdom if we 
permit Him to have His way with us. No better 
topic for this suggests itself than Jesus’ Ideals 
for the People of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

These ideals we shall undertake to outline in 
seven topics, which seem to follow the logic of 
the Sermon as we find it. 

(1) He begins with the qualities of Kingdom 
men (5:3-12). Longing earnestly to do all possi- 
ble for men, with a boundless compassion for them 
as He has come to know them, He is about to 
speak now His first great wish for His people, 
for all people. He is very conscious of their un- 
happiness. They are politically distressed by 
their humiliating subjection to the Roman Im- 
perium. They are economically distressed by the 
hard conditions under which for most life is a 
bitter fight and struggle for poor maintenance. 
Religiously they are disappointed in the long de- 
ferred hope of Jehovah’s deliverance. What 
shall He say to them on this, the most important 
occasion on which He has yet spoken. 

He opened His mouth and taught them, saying 
‘*Blessed.’’ When we think of the meaning of 
the word it must strike us with a shock. The 
author well remembers how this word rose up and 

72 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


smote him with startling force as He read it in 
the Greek some years ago. ‘‘Blessed!’’? Over 
and over He repeats it. He wishes men to be 
‘‘happy’’ in the highest sense of that word. And 
He tells them the qualities of soul, the character- 
istics of spirit that go to make the man who is 
rightly to be congratulated. There is no need 
here to consider the Beatitudes in detail. 
Attention is called to the fact that they all fall 
into two classes: First those which describe what 
one is in his true, inward self; what his deep long- 
ings and desires; what his way of thinking of 
himself and life. Then what one is in his attitude 
to the human, world environment in which he 
finds himself; what one is trying to do for men. 
In the first group it is ‘‘the poor in spirit,’’ ‘‘the 
hungry soul craving righteousness,’’ ‘‘the meek,’’ 
‘‘the pure in heart.’’ In the second group we find 
the ‘‘happy’’ man trying to make peace in a war- 
ring social order, bestowing mercy on evil and 
suffering fellow-men. How strange all this de- 
scription seemed that day in Palestine. Alas, 
how strange it all seems this day in America. 
Nothing of position, all of disposition. Nothing 
of how people and circumstance are treating you 
and behaving toward you. It is all turning upon 
what you are doing, and fitted to do, to others; 
how you are reacting to an unsatisfactory, even 
an oppressive, environment. The one exception to 
this is the beatitude on the persecuted man, pro- 
vided it truly is persecution, not punishment, that 
it is for the sake of righteousness and for the 
sake of Christ Jesus. In that case one is to be 
73 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


hilariously glad; ‘‘For, great is your reward in 
heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets that 
were before you.”’ 

Why are such men to be congratulated, why are 
they happy, why to be accounted fortunate? Be- 
cause they have ideals, they are aware of their 
_ limitations, their needs; they are dissatisfied with 
themselves and with their world, dissatisfied in 
a holy discontent, and so they are open for God to 
come in and use them for higher things, they have 
become prophets for Him. 

(2) It is in this last ‘‘beatitude’’ that we make 
transition to the second point of the Sermon: the 
Function of Kingdom Men (5:12-16). Jesus is 
now speaking of the use He wishes to make of 
those who come in with Him. What is it He is 
calling them to be and to do by being? He says 
it in three ways. ‘‘Blessed are ye when men shall 
say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my 
sake. So persecuted they the prophets that were 
before you.’’ The emphasis is on you and on the 
connection with Jesus, ‘‘for my sake.’? Jesus 
proposes to make prophets of His people. And 
it is when our message becomes so much that of 
Jesus that men who would spurn and slander and 
persecute Him turn upon us ‘‘for His sake’’ that 
we are subjects of His ‘‘blessed.’’ Of course a 
prophet is not primarily one who predicts. Usu- 
ally he does not foretell. Always he is God’s 
spokesman to his own time. He discerns and in- 
terprets God in the present life and order. He 
tells what God’s thought is about men’s conduct, 
ways of living, society, government, religion, 

74 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


theology. He may foretell God’s course and its 
outcome in men. Such was Jesus; such He will 
make of His workers. If we are like Him and 
speaking for Him men whose ideas, conduct and 
plans are rebuked and who are yet unwilling to 
correct their ways will turn on us, as they turned 
on Him. The world needs prophets. Jesus says ~ 
when your message has so become Mine that men 
resent it and persecute you you have become 
prophets. 

The world has always persecuted its prophets. 
Tt does so still. Every generation kills its own 
prophets while it builds memorials to the prophets 
of former generations. % 

‘‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’’ Thus, in a new 
figure, Jesus restates the function of Kingdom 
folk. God wishes to use you to save His world. 
Tt has in it elements of corruption, decay, death. 
The salt arrests these processes; and also stimu- 
lates and strengthens the forces of life. The salt 
must lose itself in this saving process. Unless 
Christ’s people are used to save God’s world, how 
shall He save it? | 

Once more Jesus says it: ‘*Ye are the light of 
the world.’’? To that end they must seek the high- 
est purity and the most advantageous position for 
doing this great service. Like the city on the hill, 
like the lamp on the lamp-stand, ‘‘even so let your 
light shine before men; that they may see your 
good works and glorify your Father who is in 
heaven.’? Some one has called attention to the 
men, the class of men and the individuals, to whom 
Jesus first spoke these words, and to the amazing 

75 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


boldness of such a statement. A group of peas- 
ants and fisher-folk, unlettered and with no repu- 
tation or standing; men of a small, haughty, ex- 
elusive, hating and hated race. Yet His words 
have been marvelously verified. Their light has 
illuminated the world; they have rebuked the sins 
of the whole human race, they have saved the 
world from self-destruction. Truly ‘‘the saints 
rule the earth’’ in the only worthy sense of ruling 
the world—that they determine iis direction and 
its destiny. Jesus makes the call to each genera- 
tion of His people. We must be for Him and for 
humanity prophets, salt, light, at all cost, in all 
humility, in all wisdom, in all abandon—we must. 

(3) Next Jesus takes up the moral and ethical 
standards for Kingdom folks. He discusses this 
at greater length than any other single item. 
Here is where we are most apt to temporize and 
compromise, to ease up on ourselves. Yet this is 
the first urgency for God’s prophets if they will 
light and save the world. 

There were two classes before Him to whom 
Jesus must say a clear word on this point, besides 
His call to His special representatives. The for- 
mal leaders and guardians of the Jewish religion 
and social organization—the elders, scribes and 
Pharisees—were not only jealous and vexed with 
this upstart, unauthorized Teacher who had 
gained such unprecedented influence and follow- 
ing. They were frankly uneasy about the founda- 
tions and structure of their social organism. He 
ignores convention and flouts tradition. He wor- 
ships freely and regularly in their synagogues 

76 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


and visits the temple; yet He finds God as freely 
and as readily in the field, on the highway, in the 
byway, in the market, in the slum. His only 
recognition of the always persistent distinction 
between good and religious people on the one 
hand and ‘‘publicans and sinners’’ on the other 
seems to be in a sort of favoritism for the bad 
class, while yet no stain of badness attaches to 
Him. If this goes on what is to become of the 
structure, even the very foundations of religion 
and of social ethics, of society itself? He is tak- 
ing ‘‘the law and the prophets’’ in His own hands 
and ignores all the authoritative interpretations 
of them so laboriously built up through genera- 
tions of pious scholarship. With it all Jesus is 
teaching and preaching to more people than can 
ever on a Sabbath be found in all the synagogues. 
The situation seems serious. Jesus addresses 
Himself to this alarm: ‘‘Do not worry about Me 
and what I may do to your law. I came not to 
pull down law or prophets, but to complete both. 
They mean more to Me than the whole physical 
universe—‘heaven and earth’: all is to be accom- 
plished. Any teacher in the Kingdom which I am 
preaching who disregards one of the least com- 
mandments of the law and prophets, in his own be- 
havior and in his teaching, shall be accounted the 
smallest man in that Kingdom.”’ 

But there was danger from another direction. 
The ‘‘unchurched multitudes’’—an abominable 
term—had turned with the eagerness of a new 
hope to this open-air, open-souled Preacher. The 
superficial religious standards, the endless round 

77 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


of ceremonial, the exacting regulations of the 
minutie of daily routine were for many too heavy 
a burden to win the standing of ‘‘the righteous.’’ 
They found the grind of hard conditions already 
too much for them to make ends meet in food and 
clothing, and could not find time or energy to be 
‘‘eood.’? And the synagogue sermons didn’t usu- 
ally find the soul in its real needs. Many had 
given over all effort to be ‘‘religious’’ and ac- 
cepted their classification among ‘‘publicans and 
sinners.’’ But Jesus had come to them with ‘‘a 
God so nigh unto them’’ in field and in forum, 
looking up at them from the flowers of the field, 
speaking to them in the winds and waving grain; 
a God who loves and cares and is always near. 
He talked and lived as if for Him, and for them, 
God was as present in daily conditions and life as 
in synagogue on the Sabbath or in temple at Pass- 
over and Atonement Day. Surely the God of 
Jesus could not be exacting of poor, frail human- 
ity. It would not really matter much with Him 
about their transgressions and sins. 

Jesus must guard against the notion that He 
does not regard righteousness as secondary in His 
kingdom plans. It is breath-taking to hear Him 
say now, ‘‘I say unto you, that except your right- 
eousness shall exceed that of the scribes and 
Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the king- 
dom of heaven.’’ Itis as if He said: ‘‘Unless you 
are better than the theological teachers and the 
guardians of orthodoxy demand, and are, there is 
no place for you in My following.’’ 

Such a drastic word needs explanation. He 

78 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


gives it in concrete examples, selecting for this 
purpose outstanding commands and the corre- 
sponding sins, murder, adultery, false swearing, 
retaliation, unneighborliness. In each case He 
states the orthodox teaching of the day, as sus- 
tained by the ancient scriptures, and then pro- 
claims His own injunction. We need not follow 
out the contrasts in detail. In each case He goes 
to the root of the sin, in the heart motive, the ini- 
tial thought out of which action grows. And He 
repudiates all compromise, all shrewd evasion. 
The ‘‘doctors of the law’’ laid down stern com- 
mands, applying them only to open act, not to 
producing attitude; then cunningly devised ways 
of evading the guilt of violation. It is a common 
trick of human nature not easy to root out of even 
the Christian soul. 

Murder was prohibited. For them murder 
meant the actual slaying of a man. Jesus said 
that murder exists in any soul that harbors ha- 
tred of another human being. Thus He located 
murder, and every other sin, in the seed of 
thought, not the fruit of deed. His teaching was 
too searching for even the Christian conscience, 
and some scribe in copying introduced a modify- 
ing phrase which gained wide acceptance and is 
still found in our King James version, but no 
longer in any of the revised versions. The scribe 
added ‘‘without a cause.’’ But Jesus admitted no 
cause for hatred that could take out of it the 
taint and the guilt of murder. 

The scribes interpreted ‘‘Thou shalt not com- 
mit adultery’’ of the act; Jesus finds the sin in 

79 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


the look of lust, and finds no provision for divorce 
in the ideal of His Father. 

False swearing was clearly an iniquity, but the 
scribes graded oaths so that one might swear by 
the earth and lapse if only his heaven-bound oath 
were inviolate, or might absolve himself from an 
oath by the altar of sacrifice if he kept the asser- 
tion sealed by the offering on the altar. Jesus 
swept aside all refuge of lies and bade a man 
understand that God is witness to every word he 
utters, so that ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’ are in every case 
pledged by all a man’s character and religion. 

So long as retaliation is measured by exact and 
just equivalence Moses’ law seemed to be satis- 
fied. Under this interpretation Shylock might 
have his sixteen ounces of flesh if the scales bal- 
anced exactly, but Jesus not only goes beyond all 
retaliation, but in the place of all anti-social and 
unsocial motivation puts love for the enemy ex- 
pressing itself in service. 

Thus He rises to the transcendent standard 
which He states with bold, bald simplicity: ‘‘Ye 
therefore shall be perfect as your heavenly Father 
is perfect.’? He is quoting Moses (Lev. 19:2), 
but He is also quoting God and He transfers a 
command from the ceremonial, religious realm, in 
which Moses placed it, to the vital, social sphere 
which must be all sacred to the man who goes with 
Jesus Christ. 

Fifteen years ago a father was studying this 
passage while his little boy lay near on the floor. 
Both were to have the same passage in the Sun- 
day school classes the next Sunday. The father 

80 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


read this verse and said: ‘‘George, do you know 
what that means?’’ George shook his head. The 
father said, ‘‘Jesus says He wants us to be as 
good as God is.’? The boy turned his face up- 
ward, opened wide a pair of blue eyes and 
whistled, ‘‘W-h-e-w! I couldn’t ever be as good 
as that!’’ The father said: ‘‘No, we can’t be as 
good as that, but isn’t it great that Jesus wants us 
to be like God.’’ Could we follow Jesus as we do 
if He had for us any lower standard of morals 
and ethics than perfection, if He could be content 
until He has made us true sons and daughters of 
His perfect Father?’’ It is good to link this ideal 
of Jesus with God’s word, through Paul in Rom. 
8:29: ‘*Whom He did foreknow them He did pre- 
destinate to be conformed to the image of His 
Son, that He might be [only] the first-born among 
many brothers.’’ Jesus wants us to be like His 
Father. The Father wants us to be like His Son. 
‘‘Beloved, now are we God’s children, and it is 
not yet made clear what we shall be. We know 
that if it shall be made clear we shall be like Him; 
for we shall see Him as Heis. And every one that 
has this hope over him purifies himself just as 
that One is pure’’ (I John 3:2 ff.). 

(4) Jesus comes now to speak of the religion 
of the Kingdom man, of His relation to God and 
communion with Him (6:1-18). About this He 
has just one word to say: Be honest. It is sur- 
prising until we think of it. Do we say: ‘‘ Why, of 
course one is honest in worship’’? Probably no- 
where else is it so easy for us to deceive our- 
selves. Hence Jesus searches us out at just this 

81 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


point. ‘‘Take heed that ye do not your right- 
eousness before men to be seen of them: else ye 
have no reward with your Father who is in 
heaven.’’ ‘‘Be honest with God.’’ That is all; 
that is all. It is a remarkable thing that the Ser- 
mon on the Mount has no word in it about honesty 
among men. If one is truly honest with God he 
will be honest in every human relation. And he 
will be more than honest. This more-than-honest 
ideal Jesus urges throughout. Only by being 
more than honest can we build God’s Kingdom. 
Only let us never make the mistake of thinking 
that if we are generous and brotherly we may 
omit punctilious care to be honest. No dishonest 
man can be honestly generous. 

Jesus illustrated His call to sincerity in reli- 
gion by the three characteristic religious acts: 
almsgiving, praying, fasting. In each He warns 
against hypocrisy, ostentation, desire for human 
observation and recognition. It must be wholly 
and exclusively for God if it is to be truly worship 
of God. The chief emphasis is here, of course, on 
prayer. There is the ‘‘holy of holies’’ for wor- 
ship. In ‘‘the holy place’’ one may give, and 
in the courts of the soul’s temple fasting and 
other works of worship find place. But when one 
prays it is very personal, very individual. One 
goes into the Most Holy Place for prayer. Jesus 
drops the plural ‘‘ye’’ with which He came up to 
the prayer experience, and counsels the indi- 
vidual, ‘‘thou.’? One is to go into his private 
closet and shut the door, and there himself alone 
with God make known his requests. It is a very 

82 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


solemn, searching situation in which Jesus places 
the soul. No wonder the prayer is so unusual 
which Jesus suggests. Itis very simple, and very 
comprehensive, very brief, but wide-reaching, and 
absolutely unselfish. It is truly the prayer of a 
Kingdom soul. 

Jesus suggests the attitude of the soul toward 
God, and indirectly toward men: ‘‘Father of us, 
who art in heaven.’’ Then one supreme objective 
stated in three terms: ‘‘Thy name be hallowed,”’ 
“Thy Kingdom come’’; ‘Thy will on earth as in 
heaven.’’ At last the requests for a man thus 
related to God, thus consumed with the passion 
for God to be honored on earth, completely. All 
purely private needs seem to be forgotten. The 
pray-er desires only food, forgiveness, protection 
trom the evil one, while he gives himself up to 
Kingdom service. 

(5) Naturally the thought moves next to em- 
phasis on the controlling objective of life for one 
who is in the Kingdom of Heaven (6: 19-34). 

Running through the whole paragraph is the 
necessity for having one single objective. Di- 
vided loyalties dissipate the energies, nullify 
power, harass the soul, obscure the vision. Just 
as lack of focus of the eyes gives one two retinal 
pictures with confusion and darkness, so lack of 
concentrating spiritual insight leaves the soul in 
confusion and groping. ‘‘And if the inner light be 
darkness how terrible is that darkness’’ (v. 23). 
‘‘No man can serve two masters.’’ Thus Jesus 
makes His plea for placing the treasure to be 
sought where the heart should be. 

83 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


He points out two persistent, dangerous rivals 
to the true objective that should command our un- 
divided devotion and effort: treasure getting and 
anxious worry over daily needs and bodily de- 
sires. He points out the folly and futility and 
the essential heathenism of being led away after 
these rivals. They destroy faith and minister to 
irreligion. ‘‘After all these things the heathen 
seek,’’ 

Thus He comes to state the true objective that 
is to command and direct all our energies of 
prayer, longing, effort: ‘‘Seek ye first the King- 
dom of God and His righteousness.’’ If we do 
this we shall never lack for mere ‘‘things,’’ never 
really lack as God sees need, for ‘‘your heavenly 
Father knows ye have need of all these things”’ 
which accordingly ‘‘shall be added unto you.’’ 
Occupied always ‘‘first’’ with God’s Kingdom in- 
terests and trusting Him as your Father you 
will never ‘‘borrow trouble’? knowing that 
‘“‘enough for to-day is its own needs.”’ 

(6) Instead of thinking of the matter in Matt. 
“VII as a lot of miscellaneous material loosely 
thrown together let us seek some unity and har- 
mony. Do not verses 1-12 set before us the Social 
Rule for Kingdom People? 

We began with a necessary warning against a 
wrong attitude toward other people and especially 
against thus prostituting to hurtful uses, instead 
of helpful ends, the powers of discriminating 
judgment. Man’s personality nowhere rises 
higher than in the fine use of his powers of dis- 
tinction and judgment. But it is a very danger- 

84 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


ous power. We are constantly tempted to use 
it in censorious criticisms, captious cavilings, 
haughty contempts, cynical sneers. These are the 
dogs and swine that trample and devour these 
holy gifts of noble personality, these pearls of 
rational being. By the rhetorical figure called 
chiasm, from the Greek letter y Jesus places 
the extremes and means of a four-term simile 
in the arrangement of verse 6. The swine trample 
the pearls, while the dogs devour the holy things. 
Thus a man loses his capacity for clear thinking: 
and honest dealing. He is cartooned by Jesus 
as going about offering his services to take splin- 
ters out of his neighbors’ eyes while a stake pro- 
trudes from his own eye. 

Jesus next sets out that relation to God and 
His resources which will place a man in position 
and give him the disposition to keep the Golden 
Rule. If one is living for God’s Kingdom as 
urged in chapter VI, and if he thinks of himself 
as God’s ‘‘prophet,’’ ‘‘salt’’ and ‘‘light,’’ then 
he has such access to God that he can ask and © 
receive whatever God’s interests in any case may 
require, he can seek wisdom or supplies and find 
them, he can knock at God’s treasure house and 
the door will open for him. 

With this preparation and approach Jesus is 
ready to announce the Golden Rule of the King- 
dom of Heaven: ‘‘All things, therefore’’—it is 
this ‘‘therefore’’ that gives us the clew to the 
entire paragraph, and that shows us how it be- 
comes possible for one to make the rule of Jesus 
the guide to his social conduct. A man thus re- 

85 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


lated to God can, and can afford to, do unto other 
men whatsoever he would wish done to himself 
under the same circumstances, if he looked upon 
the situation from God’s viewpoint. 

(7) The last paragraph of the Sermon carries 
four Warnings to the Men of the Kingdom (7: 18- 
27). | 

The way of Jesus is not easy. It cannot be 
entered without taking pains, nor traveled with- 
out caution and effort. One must be prepared 
to go against convention and custom, and to walk 
apart from the throng. One must be willing to be 
different, and must determine his course on prin- 
ciple and not ‘‘go with a multitude to do evil.”’ 

Then, too, it will be needful to guard against 
false teachers. ‘There will always be those who 
would mislead simple souls seeking to be good and 
godly. Teachers and leaders must be tested, and 
followed only if their fruits approve their doc- 
trines. This simple pragmatic test is for the 
many well-intentioned the best practical way of 
selecting leaders. 

And we must know that we are all to face the 
Lord and be finally tested by His perfect insight. 
Thus indirectly Jesus here sets Himself up as the 
Judge of our lives, our motives, our work. We 
must not deceive ourselves. We may even ‘‘in 
His name’’ ‘‘do many mighty works’’ without 
really being His. He may deny all favorable 
knowledge of us. Here is call for present self- 
searching in His clear light. 

With an audacity sublime in its simplicity Jesus 
tells us, at length, that the outcome of all one’s 

86 


THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 


life, one’s destiny will turn on his acceptance or 
rejection of these ideals which He has stated for 
us. He who accepts and builds on this founda- 
tion will have a house that endures unto eternity. 
It will ‘‘have survival value’’ and so will stand 
all the forces of ruin. He who neglects and re- 
jects the counsel of Christ Jesus will find all his 
life-building tumbling upon him in terrible de- 
struction. His house of character, achievement, 
accumulation may be small or great. It is all that 
a man has; and if it fall ‘‘great is the fall 
thereof.’’ 

The Sermon is done. What impression does 
it make? What is its response in us? ‘‘The mul- 
titudes were astonished at His teaching: for He 
taught them as having authority, and not as their 
scribes.’? What was the nature of the ‘‘author- 
ity’’ that so impressed them, and that continues 
century by century to impress every generation? 
Surely not an external authority of the orthodox 
theologian and of the dogma of religious councils. 
That was exactly the sort of ‘‘authority’’ the 
scribes were always relying on and enforcing. 
Jesus’ authority was impressive by contrast. 
They cited Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Juda, and 
Rabbi Simon and ‘‘the Great Synagogue,’’ tracing 
their tradition back through centuries. So the 
rabbis still teach and seek to impose the ‘‘author- 
ity’’ of their creeds. Jesus astonished by an- 
other method. His ‘‘I say unto you’’ was not the 
assertion of another external authority to be ac- 
cepted as either master or guide to a man’s con- 
science in such a way as to leave him free from re- 

87 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


sponsibility for moral decisions or bound by su- 
- perior dominance. The Greek word helps us, be- 
cause it exactly describes the situation before us. 
The word—otvova—means the out-giving-of-being. 
It is the authority of fundamental, essential truth 
and reality. Something in each man rises up at 
the words of Jesus to approve them. One knows 
at once that Jesus is speaking the deepest truth, 
uncovering God’s will before his heart’s eyes. 
If I do not approve what He tells me to be and 
do I know that I condemn myself in disapprov- 
ing. He has spoken to my deepest soul. He has 
searched out my hidden parts. I know He is 
right. ‘‘Never man spake like this man.’’ He 
has handled Moses with great freedom and has 
boldly given me new interpretations of God’s 
Word, and has spoken new words of God to me. 
And my soul says, ‘‘Amen.’’ I know He has 
spoken what I ought to approve and to do. His 
is the authority of reality. Will.I accept it? 
Will I follow on? One is glad that Matthew 
adds (8:1, unfortunately cut off by the chapter 
division) that ‘‘when He came down from the 
mountain great multitudes followed Him.’’ Hum- 
bly let me join that throng, and press on each of 
us to be one in the Kingdom of His God. 


88 


CHAPTER VI 


IN A SOLILOQUY JESUS ASSUMES THE MORAL BURDEN 
OF THE HUMAN RACE (Matt. 11: 20-30) 


After the Sermon on the Mount and with His 
organized apostolate Jesus entered upon a year 
of intensive popular ministry, continuing the lines 
of work which had won this great following and 
led up to the Sermon and the organization. Most 
of this ministry was in Galilee, but with a signifi- 
cant trip to Jerusalem. There was no abatement 
in His popularity. Wherever He went He was 
thronged. At times there was no opportunity for 
eating in any quiet or privacy. By numerous in- 
cidental remarks the Evangelists indicate for us 
the multitudinous and frequently tumultuous 
pressure under which the Master ‘‘went about 
doing good, and healing all that were oppressed 
of the devil’? (Peter—Acts 10: 38). 

Twelve months before the crucifixion Jesus took 
a new turn in His work. To the populace and to 
His ‘‘disciples,’’ as well as even to His apostles, it 
was a strange, inexplicable, disappointing course 
upon which He now entered. He withdrew for 
most of the time, so far as it was possible for 
Him to get away from crowds. He devoted Him- 
self to teaching the Twelve. This is recognized 
by almost all students as a distinct period or di- 
vision of the ministry of the Master. Those who 

89 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


take a low view of Him fancy that He now saw 
that it was hopeless to gain acceptance as Messiah 
—at least on any terms of Messiahship which His 
conscience would permit Him to accept; and that 
He shrewdly changed His tactics and rescued His 
ministry and message from failure by a sort of 
esoteric organization into which He brought, and 
was able to hold, a relatively small group of His 
more spiritual and more intimately attached fol- 
lowing. All this notion fits badly into the picture 
of Jesus and His ministry in the Gospels and 
flatly contradicts their interpretation of Him. 

Certain it is, however, that He did, with purpose 
and persistence, in this last year, seek to avoid 
and evade the crowds, postpone until He was 
ready for it the fatal issue with His enemies, and 
give Himself with great skill and patience to 
what the late A. B. Bruce has so well styled ‘‘The 
Training of the Twelve,’’ in the title to a book 
which is the classic among many discussions of 
this important phase of the work of Jesus. If 
He would leave any abiding result of His life and 
labor, especially if He would project Himself and 
His ‘‘Glad Tidings,’’ His rescuing love, into the 
growth and destiny of mankind, He must give 
special instructions, special training, special spir- 
itual insight and equipment to this inner circle of 
followers. 

It was by no means easy to get away from the 
populace. It was almost impossible and fre- 
quently wholly impossible, so that we find many 
instances and incidents in this last year where the 
multitudes are with Him. This was a desirable, 

90 


ASSUMES MORAL BURDEN OF HUMAN RACE 


a necessary, part of His work still. With the 
Twelve He withdrew hither and thither, seeking 
the needed privacy, once getting entirely outside 
Palestine in the Syrian country toward Tyre and 
Sidon. 

In the passage now before us we seem to catch 
Jesus just at this turning point in His method 
and in His plan. To be sure Luke locates it just 
at the return of the Seventy whom Jesus sent out 
on a tour representing Him (Luke 10:13 ff.), 
and the harmonists locate this sending of the 
Seventy well within the final year of the ministry. 
But such a locating of this phase of the work is 
out of harmony with the spirit, the movement and 
the general course of the facts. Both Luke and 
Matthew represent the soliloquy which we are 
now to study as following directly upon the ‘‘up- 
braiding of the cities wherein most of His mighty 
works had been done, because they repented not.’’ 

Jesus is frankly facing relative failure in His 
preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven to the 
people. Not that we are to suppose He was sur- 
prised, and in that sense disappointed. The 
actual fact and experience of failure is, however, 
upon Him; and there is no prescience or prepara- 
tion that can take away the grief and sting of 
failure to do the good to people to which one 
had devoted all his energy. 

We have seen that Jesus had prepared Himself 
for such failure from the beginning. Besides His 
own insight, His Isa. XLIX would have led Him 
to see the course of His reception by the people, 
as would the whole tenor of those scriptures which 

91 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


He had manifestly chosen as guides in under- 
standing and discharging His functions. 

Yet few would have agreed with Him that He 
was failing—probably not one would have agreed. 
He had never been more popular. Even after He 
begins to separate Himself from them the mul- 
titudes seek Him out on every opportunity, and 
after the feeding of the five thousand they are 
about to force upon Him the crown of the King- 
dom. They are ready to risk all and follow Him 
in revolt against all authority, religious and polit- 
ical. His disciples—including the Twelve—would 
have been ready for such a move. 

Therein appears His superior insight. Here 
was for Him the mark of His failure. The people 
were missing the point of His appeal. They 
wanted a bread King. They wanted His miracle 
personality to perform in miracles of provision 
and protection, deliverance and defense while un- 
changed in heart and life they would enjoy a 
physical, a material Messianic reign. How it 
all wrung His soul and drove Him to prayer. 
He was calling them to repentance, they wished 
to follow Him to power. He wanted to get God 
into them, they wanted to get Him and God 
into their service. His soul is wrung with 
deep anguish because of their deep need of 
repentance and their persistent unrepentance. 
He has tried so hard, so faithfully, so unself- 
ishly, so perfectly tried to give them God, and 
they haven’t seen it. Every devoted worker for 
men and with men knows a little of what that grief 
and disappointment mean. Yet Jesus will not 

92 


ASSUMES MORAL BURDEN OF HUMAN RACE 


give up. ‘‘He will not fail.’? He must find a way. 
He must save. We catch Him just as He is facing 
this problem of reaching and redeeming such a 
people as these of Capernaum and Chorazin and 
Bethsaida: such as all men, for we are all the 
same. We do make it so very difficult for Jesus 
Christ to save us, so desperately hard. ‘‘ With 
what anguish and loss’’ must Jesus ‘‘go to the 
cross,’’ and ‘‘carry our sins with Him there.’’ 

He is here (verses 25-30) in a soliloquy. He is 
‘‘talking to Himself.’? Matthew says, ‘‘He an- 
swered and said’’; but no man and no word is 
named for Him to answer. No, it is a situation 
which He is answering. He is talking to Himself. 
But.when a wise man talks to himself he talks to 
God—he prays, and Jesus was never more truly 
in prayer than in this soliloquy. Let us draw 
near and listen, and try to interpret His con- 
sciousness in this critical, sacred hour. 

We can readily mark three stages of His con- 
sciousness. 

1. His first expression is thankful acceptance 
of the Father’s will and plan (verse 25). It is 
with Him no mere falling back on God’s compre- 
hensive will to sustain Himself while He submits 
to the inevitable, an experience with which we are 
all so familiar. Such submission is an attitude of 
piety and reverence, and one that saves us from 
despair, and rescues us from despondency, and 
saves us for some new endeavor. But Jesus goes 
far beyond this. He is not surrendering to the in- 
evitable. He is accepting His experience and His 
task with all its difficulties and all its heartaches, 

93 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


and accepting it gladly. It is one thing to submit 
to God’s will in helpless surrender. It is a wholly 
different thing to accept God’s will as our way 
and find His plan our task and our delight. It is 
very difficult for us, but very blessed and mean- 
ingful if 


In hours of pain and grief 
We learn in Him unfaltering faith and trust, 
Obey because we will and not because we must. 


In the face of the situation, fully apprehended, 
Jesus says: ‘‘I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of 
heaven and earth, that Thou didst hide these 
things from the wise and understanding, and didst 
reveal them unto babes: yea, Father, for so it was 
well-pleasing in Thy sight.’’ The word for ‘‘1 
thank Thee’’ is more than acceptance, more than 
just gratitude. It is eouoAoydtuar, which means 
I give out the expression of an inward agreement. 
He is wholly at one with His Father. 

For one thing, the work has not wholly failed. 
Child-hearted souls have seen and accepted. 
Those who are wise in their own conceits and 
proud of their own understanding have not seen. 
But humble minds, conscious of spiritual ig- 
norance and religious need, have understood. 
Something has been gained, some are saved and 
linked with Him. 

And such is the true method for transforming 
humanity. Only with those open to the leader- 
ship of the Teacher is teaching possible. We are 
all too apt to seek especially to make the Christ 

94 


ASSUMES MORAL BURDEN OF HUMAN RACE 


and His plan acceptable to the learned leaders, 
and by shifting the emphasis from ‘‘the form of 
healthful teaching’’ to make easier the acceptance 
of a weakened gospel. In matters of the spirit 
and of the Kingdom of God the physician can heal 
only the sick, the Master can instruct only the 
consciously ignorant. Recall the Beatitudes. The 
hope of the Christ lies with those who have the 
qualities therein portrayed. Pilate was a higher 
type, as men reckon, than Peter, but Jesus could 
carry Peter spiritual leagues beyond Pilate. 
Caiaphas was a far superior man to Levi, but the 
publican could become an apostle to all ages be- 
cause he could ‘‘leave all and follow Jesus,’’ while 
poor Pilate leaves a memorial to intellectual and. 
moral cowardice in the Swiss mountain (Pilatus) 
where he committed suicide. 

In various mission fields just now one finds a 
feverish anxiety to win ‘‘the men of influence,’’ 
to capture ‘‘the leaders’’ and ‘‘the makers of the 
new China,’’ ‘‘the new India,’’ ‘‘the new Japan.’’ 
And that is well if they are ‘‘captured,’’ but there 
is much danger of missing the way of the Master 
when we make distinctions between ‘‘coolies’’ and 
‘‘returned students’’ and devote larger means 
and ‘‘abler’? men to minister to the cultured. 

Jesus has all through the centuries made far 
more leaders than He has captured. We do not 
forget Saul of Tarsus and Francis of Assisi and 
Alfred Wallace. Still it remains that the door of 
the Kingdom is open for those who repent and 
become ‘‘as little children.’? Any man who can 
repent has the child heart. Such are the ‘‘sons 

95 


-THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


of the Kingdom’’ and in them is the foundation 
of success. , 

It was His Father’s way. That was enough 
for Jesus. ‘‘Yea, Father, for thus it came about 
as satisfactory in Thy presence.’’ What is God’s 
pleasing way is our winning course. 

2. We next see Jesus accepting the moral bur- 
den of the human race. The weight of the world’s 
loss and need rests upon Him (verse 27): ‘‘ All 
things have been delivered unto me of my 
Father.’’ Here is no assertion of prerogative, 
no boast of position, no claim of preéminence— 
no claim at all, but a solemn bending beneath the 
tremendous weight of a lost humanity. He has 
just seen men, under the finest possible oppor- 
tunities and the most winning persuasion, turn 
away from the call of God. ‘‘All we like sheep 
have gone astray, we have turned every one after 
his own way,’’ even while the Good Shepherd 
stood among us and called, ‘‘and the Lord hath 
laid on Him the iniquity of us all.’?’ The ‘‘woe”’ 
of Capernaum’s unrepentance has become the 
burden of the Son of God. ‘‘The government is 
upon His shoulders,’’ and the mark of it is not 
in the epaulettes of empire, but in bloody stripes 
by which we are healed. It is when men have as- 
tonished God (see Isa. 59: 15-24) with their wick- 
edness and impenitence of heart that the Re- 
deemer must come to Zion. In the same spirit 
the Christ will speak in ‘‘the Great Commission’’ 
of His ‘‘authority in heaven and on earth’? (Matt. 
28: 18-20), by reason of which He must undertake 
the teaching of all the nations. His ‘‘authority 

96 


ASSUMES MORAL BURDEN OF HUMAN RACE 


over all flesh’? (John 17:2) meant responsibility 
for all men, in their sins, their deadness, their 
need of redemption. 

No wonder we hear from Him a ery of isola- 
tion and loneliness: ‘‘No one knoweth the Son 
save the Father.’’ He was not appreciated nor 
understood by any single soul. None shared His 
burden. He must ‘‘tread the wine-press alone.’’ 
He has found no single soul that can know 
how He feels among sinners, nor share His 
burden. 

The masses who have eagerly hung on His 
words readily grasped the blessings that fell 
from His mercy-miracled hands, enthusiastically 
glowed in the charm of His matchless personality, 
none of them have known what He meant when 
He talked of sin, of righteousness, of the Father’s 
and His own glory tarnished on earth by the 
selfish practices of men. 

And His own family: have not His mother and 
brothers twice come to drag Him away from the 
crowds and get Him back home for rest and for 
regaining His poise because they could not under- 
stand the zeal that consumed Him? And will not 
those brothers, a little later, grow so impatient of 
His notoriety and His pretensions that they will 
petulantly advise Him to go on to Jerusalem, in 
face of the determination there to put an end to 
Him, and announce His claims and see what comes 
of it? (John 7:1-9.) 

He had multitudes of professed ‘‘disciples,’’ 
but He had early found that He could not trust 
Himself to them because ‘‘He knew what was in 

97 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


man’’ (John 2:23 ff.). And now, very shortly, 
many of His disciples will begin to turn back and 
no longer go about with Him (John 6:66). Even 
the Twelve will confess their disappointment; and 
not without care and skill will He hold them to the 
end. They have been with Him a long while 
without knowing Him. And this remaining year 
together will still leave them subject to Philip’s 
rebuke at the last interview: ‘‘ Have I been so long 
with you, and dost thou not know Me?”’ (John 
14:9). There come times when all of us feel 
alone and misunders‘. J. Especially is this an 
experience of growing children, grappling with a 
strange wonder of themselves. Jesus is feeling 
this now. But it is not in self-pity, nor is it the 

misery of unappreciated pride. He must be un- 
’ derstood in order to save, in order to build His 
JKingdom of love and life. 

In the next words He reaches the climax of His 
eager longing: ‘‘Neither doth any one know the 
Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the 
Son willeth to reveal Him.’’ It is a thousand 
pities that men have paused at this point in the 
pouring out of His soul in an anguish of longing 
to make men know His Father—paused to build 
metaphysical theories in theology while the Re- 
deemer’s heart breaks with longing for lost men 
who will not heed. ‘‘This is eternal life,’’ He 
will say in that final prayer at Gethsemane’s gate, 
‘“‘that they should know Thee... and Jesus 
Christ as the one whom Thou hast sent.’’? He is 
as far as possible from thinking of barring any 
from the Father. He is setting before Himself the 

. 98 


ASSUMES MORAL BURDEN OF HUMAN RACE 


problem of how to get men to this knowledge that 
gives eternal life. It is the cry of the Savior, not. 
the dogma of a theologian, that we hear from Him. 
He knows the Father; He is in a world in which 
He finds no man who knows Him; all men must 
know Him or they have missed the whole meaning 
of life, and had better never have been born. 

Knowledge always brings responsibility in be- 
half of them that are ignorant. Position is always 
a liability, which we are constantly mistaking for 
an asset. Possession inevitably makes the pos- 
sessor a steward. Jesus, giving expression to 
His sense of the stewardship of the knowledge of 
God as Father, and is feeling out for a means of 
imparting that knowledge to men. He must make 
them know His Father. How? 

3. Here we enter upon the last stage of the 
soliloquy. He tells Himself the way out. Only 
thus do we get the meaning and force of the 
familiar words: ‘‘Come unto Me, all ye that labor 
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 
Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I 
am meek and lowly of heart: and ye shall find 
rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and My 
burden is light’’ (28-30). 

Here is His method. He will carry on a school 
for teaching God to men, the Father God. Witha 
far-away look in His eyes such of His men as were 
near must have seen Him as if sweeping the earth 
in His vision of love and longing. Then He lifted 
up His voice, quivering with a passion of invita- 
tion: ‘‘Hither unto Me, all ye toiling and bur- 
dened: I, on my part, will give you release.’”’ It 

99 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


is a world call, a call to humanity, in the indi- 
vidual. The whole invitation is cast in the lan- 
guage-of the teacher. That is the designation 
Jesus most loved. Master in the Gospels is al- 
ways schoolmaster. He had read in one of His 
prophets Jehovah’s lament: ‘‘My people perish 
for lack of knowledge,’’ and had found in the 
prophets many an invitation that men come for 
learning. He knew that another name for Je- 
hovah’s Servant was ‘‘Wonderful Counselor, the 
Mighty God, Father of Eternity, Prince of 
Peace’’ (Isa. 9:6). The Spirit of Jehovah rest- 
ing upon Him would be manifest as ‘‘the spirit 
of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of coun- 
sel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the 
fear of Jehovah.’’ ‘‘His scent for God’s fear 
would be keen’’ (Isa. 11:2 ff.). 

When He comes to give the commission on the 
Mountain in Galilee, some time after His resur- 
rection—that which it is the custom to designate 
‘‘The Great Commission’’—Jesus puts it in the 
terms of the school. ‘‘Go and make all the na- 
tions pupils,’’ for disciples is just Latin for pupils. 
Jesus sends His followers out to enroll all men, 
who will, in His school. By baptizing them we put 
on a badge that proclaims them as students who 
are seeking to understand the Father, the Son, 
the Holy Spirit ‘‘unto whom’’ they are baptized. 
Then Jesus commissions His followers to posi- 
tions in His faculty, ‘‘teaching them to observe 
all things which I have commanded you.’’ He 
pledges His continuous, supervising presence 
until the task is complete. 

So in this soliloquy Jesus is thinking of Him- 

100 


ASSUMES MORAL BURDEN OF HUMAN RACE 


self as the Teacher of mankind. ‘‘Take my yoke 
upon’? was a bit of schoolboy slang to begin 
with, which, as so often happens with the school- 
boy slang, got itself introduced into the recog- 
nized vocabulary. Boys then, as boys now, liked 
to pretend not to like their teachers, and to say 
hard things about them. So to matriculate was 
to ‘‘take the teacher’s yoke’? upon you. When 
Saul went away to Gamaliel’s school his fellows 
might say he ‘‘had gone to take Old Gamaliel’s 
yoke.’’ The teacher yoked him up and drove 
him like an ox. After the manner of the Hebrew 
parallelism Jesus repeats the idea, with advance 
in meaning, by adding ‘‘and learn of me.’’ Then 
He commends Himself: as a teacher: ‘‘For I am 
meek and lowly of heart.’? He is not high and 
exalted, domineering over His pupils and making 
them afraid of Him. It is always the mark of 
a truly good teacher that his pupils do not fear 
him, do not fear to expose their ignorance before 
him. They will ask him all their questions—hon- 
est questions—with no fear of ridicule, no danger 
of contempt. HEagér learners will find him always 
on a level with them in spirit, and a wise and 
sympathetic leader into knowledge. Such a 
teacher Jesus proclaims Himself. And how He 
had proved it. How the poor ‘‘sinners’’ and the 
outcast ‘‘publicans’’ came to Him. They avoided 
the proudly righteous and puritanic Pharisee, 
but Jesus was different. They felt the pull of His 
‘‘oentleness’? and instinctively knew that He 
could help them get free of sins that they had 
come to take for granted. And God came near 
when He spoke of ‘‘the Father.”’ 
101 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


In His school Jesus declares men ‘‘find rest for 
your souls.’’ He was thinking of the drudging 
burden of the endless round of ceremonial exac- 
tions, petty negations, shallow dogmas, formal 
duties with which the religionists of the day 
loaded life down until it seemed impossible for an 
ordinary man to be godly. He was thinking of 
how hungry souls toiled in the multitudinous 
legalisms of an external goodness and found no 
relief. He knew how to rest the souls and set them 
free for joyous fellowship, fruitful service, grow- 
ing goodness. When He said, ‘‘My yoke is easy 
and my burden is light,’’ He did not mean to tell 
us that being a disciple of His is not exacting, nor 
that true righteousness is an easy task. He'abun- 
dantly takes care of all that in other teachings. 
So soon as religion becomes really possible it be- 
comes in a sense easy, for when it is genuine its 
very essence is liberating. But here the phrase 
of Jesus is still in the language of the school. His 
regulations are easy and His lessons not onerous. 
There are no meaningless rules in the school of 
Jesus and no tasks assigned for penalties. His 
school is governed by principles and the laws be- 
come inner regulations of the spirit. The lessons 
are light because they are enlightening. They put 
you in the way of learning deepest truths and 
highest realities. Pupils—real students—never 
object to hard lessons; they glory in them. But 
they want their lessons to ‘‘have some sense to 
them,’’ to lead somewhere, to hold clews to life’s 
mysteries and nature’s riddles. Any lesson that 
does that is easy, is fascinating. 

102 


ASSUMES MORAL BURDEN OF HUMAN RACE 


One of my boys came to my study door at night 
and halted. I looked up shortly and asked what 
the trouble was, for his face wore a look of dis- 
tress. ‘‘Oh, father,’’ he said, ‘‘I can’t do these old 
sums.’? ‘*What’s the matter with them?’’ ‘‘I 
don’t know,’’ he replied, ‘‘there’s no sense to 
them.’’ I called him to my desk and asked: ‘‘ What 
are they about?’’ He ‘‘didn’t know.’’ Upon exam- 
ining them I found he was taking up a new chap- 
ter in algebra. The sums were very simple. I 
tried to get him to help me so that he might see 
some meaning to the first, but he was all blank, 
and when I did it he didn’t seem to get an idea. 
On the second he followed with some sympathy. 
The third he did mostly by himself with a little 
help. The fourth he pitched into with spirit and 
pulled through. When I proposed that we now 
tackle the fifth, he declined, picked up his book 
and papers and said: ‘‘I can do them all right 
now,’’ and went off to his room. The whole proc- 
ess had taken less than ten minutes. A few nights 
later when I was retiring I noticed that his light 
was burning on the third floor and went up to see 
why he was not in bed. As I entered the door 
quietly I saw him bent over his table with paper 
all about him and working most diligently. He 
heard me, but didn’t look up. He called out: ‘‘Oh, 
dad, just give mea few more minutes. I’ve been 
working at this problem an hour and a half. I’ve 
almost got it. If you’ll give me a little more time 
[ll get it.”’ That was interesting. I went to see 
what it was, and found him at a very difficult, com- 
plicated problem. I saw that he had grasped its 

103 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


principles. He knew what it meant. It was open- 
ing up a realm of mathematical truth and beauty 
to him. No amount of time and energy was to be 
counted if only it solved his problem and set him 
free for new achievement, fresh exploits, larger 
learning. A petty problem was an intolerable 
task when it meant nothing and got him nowhere; 
a very pons asinorum was a joy and delight if it 
led across the barrier to a new field of knowledge 
and understanding. 

So we weigh lessons. So we weigh religious ex- 
perience and work. Jesus liberates the soul and 
sets it growing. He gives us the clew to all prob- 
lems and we can well give our lives to working 
them out, or to working at them to reach the solu- 
tion in eternity, if only we know that our problems 
have eternal value and that we are going on to 
eternity with them. 

In His school Jesus will teach us the meaning 
of life; and of sin that poisons life; of the uni- 
verse and the possibilities of it; of humanity and 
our chance in it, and our duty; and of God and 
what it is to be children of the God whom He re- 
veals to us. 

We hear His invitation. His school is open. 
He ealls the world into it. Is He what He thinks 
He is? Can He do what He says He will? Shall 
we not all go in and see? 


104 


CHAPTER VII 


UPON PETER’S CONFESSION JESUS ANNOUNCES THE 
METHOD OF HIs cHURCH (Matt. 16: 13-17: 9) 


Logically, if not chronologically as is probable 
also, the notable incident at Cesarea Philippi fol- 
lowed by one or two months the soliloquy in which 
Jesus was assuming the moral responsibility of 
the world. Here He reaches a critical stage in 
the training of His Apostles. Finding it practi- 
cally impossible to keep away from the multitudes 
in Galilee or across the Sea of Galilee, He led the 
Twelve on an extended tour northward going be- 
yond the borders of Palestine toward Tyre and 
Sidon. There were other reasons for this tour. 
The experience with the Syro-phenician woman 
is highly instructive. 

Turning eastward, they went along the Lebanon 
foothills to Mount Hermon, glory crown of all 
Syrian heights, with its snow cap, which feeds 
the Jordan river. 

On such a tour, unannounced and with an easy 
itinerary, the opportunities for quiet, serious in- 
struction and conference were the best of all the 
ministry of the Lord. He uses the occasion for 
leading His men to face the idea of the deepest 
tragedy of the redeeming work. He begins with 
a relatively light question: ‘‘ Who do men say that 
the Son of Man is?’’? We do not need to stop to 

105 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


decide just the wording of the inquiry. All the 
Synoptic accounts agree that the disciples under- 
stood Jesus to be asking what the opinion of men 
was about Himself. It is worthy of noting, in 
passing, that He expected them to know; and that 
it is important always for the interpreters of 
Jesus to learn the current ideas about Him. The 
people would talk more freely about Jesus in 
the presence of His disciples than when speaking 
to Him, just as they will talk more freely of any 
preacher than to him. Jesus asks what opinions 
they hear about Him. They are ready with the 
answer. It was a mixed and variant answer. 
People were saying many things. ‘‘Some say 
John the Baptist; some say Elijah, and others 
Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.’’ All put Him 
in the category of prophetic insight and author- 
ity, further defining according to this or that as- 
pect of His work which most impressed them, or 
influenced by their special interest in this or that 
prophet. 

1. Jesus elicits the definition of Peter’s ex- 
perience of Him and interprets it (16:13-17). 

This first question was only incidental and in- 
tended to lead up to the real question which Jesus 
had for them. He sets them apart from others: 
‘But ye, who say ye that [am?’’ That is what 
matters to Him, and what matters to all the world. 
These vague and variant, half-formed opinions of 
men must be instructed and corrected by the in- 
telligent convictions of those who know Him. So 
Jesus calls upon them to say what they have 
found in Him. They have had far better oppor- 

106 


JESUS ANNOUNCES METHOD OF HIS CHURCH 


tunities than others to learn Him. They have 
been His friends and companions, have eaten and 
slept with Him. They have been closely associ- 
ated with Him, some of them for a year and a 
half, all of them for more than a year. They have 
paid the price of personal sacrifice of business and 
family associations because of their attachment 
to Him. He has admitted them to the soul of Him. 
What have they found in Him? 

Peter is ready on the instant with his reply: 
‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”’ 
Again we do not need to belabor an effort to de- 
cide the exact words while we miss the force of the 
confession by using up our powers of appercep- 
tion in critical analysis. All the accounts agree 
that the confession marked a turning point in the 
development of the Apostolic interpretation of 
Jesus. It is suggested that since Matthew under- 
takes most fully to report this crisis and definitely 
marks it by a phrase (in verse 21) as a division 
point in his narrative of the teaching of the Mas- 
ter; and since Matthew’s record combines the 
words of Mark and Luke, the most obvious in- 
ference is that Jesus used all that Matthew quotes. 
Sometimes the obvious explanation is the most in- 
telligent. ‘There is no more vicious principle in 
Biblical criticism than that among variant ac- 
counts of an incident or reports of a speech that 
the briefest is most likely to be accurate. The 
briefest is always condensed, as indeed the fullest 
must be. The way Jesus responded to the con- 
fession is evidence conclusive that He regarded it 
as of the highest significance. We cannot say, 

107 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


‘‘He chose so to regard it.’’ That would attribute 
to Him an insincerity which is unworthy of sug- 
gestion. 

It is well for us to observe the method of His 
self-revelation to His disciples. He has been very 
patient with these men while they were discover- 
ing Him. He did not begin by telling them He 
was ‘‘the Christ, the Son of the living God’’ and 
asking them to follow Him in that exalted capac- 
ity. He made no dogma a pre-condition of dis- 
cipleship or even of apprentice apostleship. He 
never asked them to accept this interpretation of 
Himself as a ‘‘doctrine’”’ ‘‘positively’’ taught. 
He waited for His personality to compel in them 
an exalted interpretation. They began following 
Him as teacher to find that He was ‘‘The 
Teacher.’’ At first He was for them a prophet, to 
become ‘‘T'he Prophet,’’ and in the end the 
Maker of Prophets. They began following ‘‘a 
friend of sinners’’ to find themselves heralds of 
the Redeemer from all sin. Jesus asks only that 
men will get acquainted with Him and then accept 
what they find Him to be. 

The time does come when He must ask that men 
will define their experience of Him in terms of 
definite intelligent conviction. If they are to be 
interpreters of Him, claim Him as Master, this is 
inevitable. He cannot greatly use those who 
do not know how to tell whom they have found 
Him to be. Thus Jesus draws out from them this 
clear statement in Peter’s terms. 

How much this means to Jesus we can judge 
from the enthusiastic joy with which He greeted 

108 


JESUS ANNOUNCES METHOD OF HIS CHURCH 


Peter’s words. There is a buoyant rapture in 
His reply that we can appreciate only if we think 
of this as marking the realization in Peter of what 
He has all these years been seeking to develop 
inmen. What He missed so sadly in the soliloquy 
(Chapter VI) He finds now in this man. Here, 
at last, is one man in whose experience He has 
become the Christ, the Son of God. (We may 
compare the similar words of John 6:68 f.). Let 
us catch the note of joy as Jesus exclaims: 
‘‘Blessed art thou, Simon, Son of Jonas; for flesh 
and blood did not reveal it unto thee, but my 
Father who is in heaven.’’? Peter and God agree 
about the personality of Jesus. Itis a great thing 
to think with God about any matter. To agree 
with God about His ‘‘Son sent from heaven’? ig 
cause for holy rapture. Peter’s discovery Jesus 
attributes to God’s revelation. Hvery discovery 
is on its other side a revelation, for we cannot 
find out what God hides from us. On the other 
side, every revelation must become also a dis- 
covery, an experience, before it is vital and effec- 
tive. Peter has found Jesus out, and Jesus knows 
that the explanation lies in the fact that His 
Father has been at work in Peter’s personality. 
That is what He must count on. Now He has it. 
What He has achieved in Simon He can accom- 
plish in any other man, in all men. As Paul so 
wonderfully puts it: ‘If any [one] man is in 
Christ there is a new [order of] creation’? (2 Cor. 
0:17). Jesus has come to remake humanity, in 
the individual. Now He has an example. He has 
succeeded, 
109 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


2. In view of this experience Jesus is eagerly 
ready to announce His plan of procedure (16: 18- 
20): ‘‘And also I say unto thee, that thou art 
Peter and upon this rock I will build my church; 
and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against 
it.”? It is necessary to look somewhat closely at 
this statement. Jesus is emphatic: ‘‘And on my 
part I say.’’ God’s revelation which has become 
Simon’s conviction is His opportunity for start- 
ing afresh in His program. He has some material 
now that He can use. Long ago He had given to 
this man, on their first meeting, a prophetic name: 
‘“‘Andrew ... findeth his own brother Simon 

..and... brought him unto Jesus. Jesus 
looked upon him and said, Thou art Simon, the 
Son of Jonas: thou shalt be called Cephas (which 
is by interpretation Peter),’’ which is again by 
translation Stone. Jesus recalls now exactly His 
first words to this man, ‘‘Thou art Simon, the son 
of Jonas.’’ His prophetic hope of two years ago 
is now realized in fact: ‘‘I am now able to say, 
Thou art a stone and on the bedrock foundation 
of an experience of Me as God’s anointed Son—an 
experience which is produced in you by My 
Father’s revealing agency—I can now begin the 
erection of My Church which will never cease 
building until the work for which I am in the 
world is completed.”’ 

That Jesus is here thinking of Peter as a build- 
ing stone, now ready to lay upon the foundation, 
/ we may find the testimony of Peter himself in I 
Peter 2:5, where he refers to the Lord as a ‘‘liv- 
ing stone’’—coming unto whom ‘‘ye also as living 

110 


JESUS ANNOUNCES METHOD OF HIS CHURCH 


stones, are built up, a spiritual house, ete.’’ Peter 
does not draw the distinction in his Epistle be- 
tween the foundation bed-rock and the building 
stones, but seems to think of Jesus as the living 
corner stone, contact with whom vitalizes each 
stone to be wrought into the spiritual house. 
The phrase ‘‘spiritual house’’ seems clearly 
enough to be Peter’s expression for Jesus’ term 
Church. Into the exegesis it is not needful fur- 
ther to go here. Our explanation seems to fit’ 
both the words and the occasion, and to express 
the method of the Master. 

Jesus proceeds at once to Peter’s part in His 
work, now that he knows Jesus as the Son of God: 
‘‘J will give to thee the keys of the Kingdom of 
heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth 
shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou 
shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’’ 
The figure, of course, is wholly changed from 
foundation and building stones. Now Jesus 
stands Peter at the door of the Kingdom to admit 
men who will come in. To understand the mean- 
ing we need to take account of Matt. 18:18, where 
all the Twelve are charged with the duty of ‘‘bind- 
ing and loosing’’; of John 20:19 ff., where Jesus 
on the evening of the resurrection says to all the 
Upper Room group: ‘‘As the Father hath sent 
Me, even so send I you. . . . Receive ye the Holy 
Spirit: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are 
forgiven unto them; whose soever ye retain, they 
are retained.”’ The key to the Kingdom, then, 
is the gospel of the saving grace of God in His 
Redeemer, and the Christ places the key in the 

111 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


hands of all who have experience of Him. It is 
in our hands, not to guard against the entrance 
of men whose heads may be wrong, but to admit 
men whose experience has led them to come to 
God through His Son. We should connect with 
this John’s vision of the Christ in Rev. 1:18, 
‘the Living One,’’ who was dead and is now eter- 
nally alive and ‘‘has the keys of death and 
Hades,’’ and in Rev. 3:7, where He is described 
as having ‘‘the key of David, He that openeth 
and none shall shut, and that shutteth and none 
shall open.’’ The origin of the figure is in Isa. 
22: 22. | 

It must have seemed at the time a very strange 
injunction Jesus now laid on His disciples, ‘‘that 
they should tell no man that He was the Christ.’’ 
The prohibition seems in broad contrast with His 
delight in Peter’s confession and with the keys 
which He will place in their hands. He is almost 
overjoyed at their understanding of Him. Now 
He can do the thing He wants supremely to do. 
Yet they must not say a word to any man by way 
of telling who He is—not yet. The explanation 
is quick and startling. 

3. Jesus now comes, in one of the dramatic 
scenes of the record, to interpret the method of 
His Messiahship (16: 21-28). Nor is it a single 
explanation. It is the beginning of teaching which 
must be the chief lesson from now on. ‘‘From 
that time began Jesus Christ to point out to His 
disciples that it is necessary for Him to go on 
into Jerusalem, and to suffer many things of the 
elders and chief priests and scribes (i.e., at the 

112 | 


JESUS ANNOUNCES METHOD OF HIS CHURCH 


hands of the threefold official Judaism), and to 
be put to death, and the third day to be raised 
(or to arise).’’ 

This announcement precipitated a stormy 
scene. His friends had no place for any such ex- 
perience of suffering and defeat in their ideas of 
‘‘the Christ, the Son of the living God.’’ Peter 
was the natural spokesman now. He sprang to 
meet the occasion. ‘‘He took-Him-in-hand.’’ He 
fairly shouted in his excited resentment against 
any such outcome of the work of his Lord. He 
almost swore. Our stately translations conceal 
his agitated emphasis. ‘‘He began to rebuke Him, 
saying: ‘Mercy on Thee, Lord, not at all shall 
this be Thy lot.’ ’’ ( ‘IAgds cou, xipie, ov un Era 
got tovto. ) Peter holds the Jewish idea of the 
Messiahship, constructed of the Old Testament 
promise of exaltation and glory, and had no place 
for Jesus’ idea constructed out of the description 
of a humiliated, suffering, rejected, mediatorial 
Servant of Jehovah. These disciples were fol- 
lowing their King to a throne, not a cross; to 
dominion, not death; to glory, not to a grave. 

The issue is definitely on, and it is critical. 
Jesus deals with it in heroic severity. Peter 
must not undertake to determine for Him how 
He shall fulfill His Messiahship. How prone is 
the human heart to accept the Christ and interpret 
Him in terms of our carnal ideals. Jesus’ rebuke 
is severe. He uses the same terms with which He 
repulsed the devil when in the wilderness He pre- 
sented the same idea of a material, political 
throne swaying the nations in martial glory, and 

113 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


He calls Peter ‘‘Satan’’: ‘‘Be off behind me, 
Satan, thou art My stumbling-block, because thou 
-hast in mind not God’s ideas but those of men.’’ 

It is a stern rebuke. It was not easy for Jesus 
to take up the road to the cross. Now here is His 
best friend and highest hope, not only failing to 
sympathize with Him, but blocking the road of 
duty and destiny. Peter is a stumbling-block. 
The Greek word is that which we transliterate 
‘‘seandal’’ ( oxdvdadAov ). It is originally a ‘‘trap- 
stick,’’ the baited trigger that lured the prey to 
destruction. Peter’s course would destroy the 
Master’s character and mission. Metaphorically 
He must kick out of His way as a stumbling-stone 
this friend whom a moment ago He has hailed 
as a building stone for His Church, so that He 
may travel on the way of His Father. How near 
are high service and base hindering! 

Jesus proceeds now to tell His disciples that not 
only will He go to the cross, but that they must 
accept the same destiny in His following: ‘‘If any 
man wishes to come after Me, let him deny him- 
self, and take up his cross, and follow on after 
Me.’’ And it is no small self-denial He is setting 
before them. He means it all quite literally. He 
has, in effect, already the cross on which He will 
be crucified. Any man who goes after Him must 
accept the same principle and be ready if, and 
when, the issue comes to let them nail him to the 
eross and set it up in the ground, to die in this 
way. ‘‘Let him deny himself’’ is no eall for 
some petty reduction of luxury or indulgence. 
The himself is in the accusative (direct object) 

114 


JESUS ANNOUNCES METHOD OF HIS CHURCH 


case; not in the dative (indirect object). It is 
not that I am to deny (to) myself something. I 
am to repudiate myself as the objective of act 
or thought. Self must be pushed off the throne 
of life’s control and Christ Jesus sanctified as 
Lord in my heart. | 

The answer of Jesus to Peter’s resistance of the 
idea of his Lord’s suffering is a call to all the 
followers of Jesus to share in His Messianic mis- ° 
sion and method, in His experience. He is not 
only to be the Redeeming Servant Himself, but is 
constituting a serving group who are to share and 
extend and continue His work in His way. 

Nor does the Lord halt in His word until He 
has declared this sacrificial use of one’s life in 
suffering union with Himself the only use that can 
endure the test of certain judgment. The man 
who goes about saving his life is losing it, while 
‘whosoever shall lose his life for the sake of 
Christ Jesus shall find it.”’ 

No other life counts, or can count, for what ad- 
vantage is it for one to gain the whole cosmic 
order if he loses his soul in the process and finds 
himself facing the judgment at the end with an 
empty life? Once the soul is thus lost there is 
nothing one may give in exchange for it. T’oo late 
one may learn values. Now, through following 
the Christ, even to the cross, and aye to the cross, 
one gains a worthy life that will not only survive 
the judgment, but will attain realization through 
judgment. It is this Son of Man now calling us 
to follow Him to the cross that ‘‘shall come in the 
glory of His Father to give back to each man 

115 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


on the basis of his practice.’’ He is the Judge 
and His Kingdom so near that one must reckon 
with it even now. 

4, The clash was over, but the breach between 
Jesus and His men was sad and embarrassing all 
round. Peter had been the speaker, and had felt 
the full force of the stern word in reply, but he 
had only spoken what all applauded in their souls. 
Now all were subdued and puzzled. They do not 
know what to say to Him or to one another. He 
is grieved and troubled. How shall He lead them 
into the response to His ideal necessary for them, 
so important to Him. The atmosphere of their 
camp must have been tense and difficult. A week 
went by. There has been much reflection on their 
part, some conference and discussion it may be. 
Possibly He has remained much of the time apart 
from them. Conversation can hardly have been 
free. No normal teaching was possible. 

Let Luke tell us how they found the way out 
(9:28 ff.) : ‘‘About eight days after .. . He took 
with Him Peter and John and James, and went 
up into the mountain to pray.’’ By this time 
these three had come to an attitude where they 
could at least be invited to pray with Him. We 
all have our misunderstandings with our Lord. 
We may not as frankly and as impetuously as 
Peter rebuke Him. We may even conceal from 
ourselves the extent to which our thoughts reject 
and resent some of His ideas and acts. Blessed 
are we if we may hear Him invite us to go 
‘‘apart’’ and pray it through with Him. It tooka 
week, in this case, for even these three to come to 

116 


JESUS ANNOUNCES METHOD OF HIS CHURCH 


the point where He could give them this prayer 
invitation. They remained in the prayer retreat — 
until the next day. It was a holy season they had 
together. The three saw the Master transfigured 
before their eyes ‘‘while He was praying.’’ They 
saw Moses and Elijah, and heard them discussing 
with Jesus ‘‘His decease which He was to accom- 
plish at Jerusalem’’—talking of the very topic 
which Jesus had introduced a week before and 
which they had so resented. We do not know how 
they knew Moses and Elijah. We can all believe 
that we could have recognized them. That is a 
minor matter. The point is that they learned 
there in the prayer heights of Hermon that Jesus 
could talk freely with His Father about the cross, 
and that Moses and Elijah—in Jewish estimate 
the two greatest exponents of God in Hebrew his- 
tory—were ready to accept such a ‘‘decease’’ as 
He was accepting and planning. The Greek word 
most fittingly is ( &odos) (exodos). 

While Peter was proposing, oddly and inappro- 
priately enough, that they build three booths and 
remain indefinitely there ‘‘a bright cloud over- 
shadowed them: and behold, a voice out of the 
cloud saying, This is My Son, me Beloved in 
whom I am pleased, hear ye Him.’ 

Thus they had God’s approval st His bk of 
sacrificing Himself as the Redeemer of men. The 
Giver of the Law and the Doyen of the Prophets 
had spoken freely with Him of such an exit from 
His human existence. Now His Father, their God, 
tells them that He approves His Son in the plan 
announced and commands them to give heed to 

Up vd 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


’ Him. They must accept Jesus’ interpretation of 
the method of Messiahship and allow Him to in- 
terpret for them the way.of redeeming love. 

There is no word from God more pertinent for 
our day than this which bids men give heed to 
Jesus as He affirms and expounds the necessity 
for the cross. God says: ‘‘My Son is right about 
this matter: I approve His plan; listen to Him.’’ 
There are preachers and theological professors 
and editors and writers of books who would do 
well to ponder this word. 

We can understand in the light of the Trans- 
figuration Message, and of Jesus’ severe resent- 
ment of Peter’s refusal of the cross idea, why 
Jesus commanded His disciples (in 16:20) to tell 
no man that He was the Christ. Two reasons ap- 

pear which are one reason at bottom. As they 
- came down from the mountain He commanded the 
three to tell no one of the vision ‘‘until the Son of 
Man be risen from the dead.’?’ The carrying 
power and the meaning would be free to work 
only in the light of the open grave. But in addi- 
tion to that Jesus did not wish any man to preach 
Him as the Christ of God unless the preacher 
could include the cross in his message. The 
rejection of that idea disqualified Peter and the 
rest as proclaimers of the Messiahship. Until 
they were able to include that, Jesus sealed their 
lips. Without the cross Jesus would not be the 
Christ. He desires no witnesses who cannot see 
its necessity. 


118 


CHAPTER VIII 


x, 


GOING TO JERUSALEM FOR THE LAST TIME JESUS 
- OFFERS HIMSELF AS THE JEWS’ MESSIAH AND THE 
WORLD’S SAVIOR (John 12) 


The Gospels give large space to the events of 
‘‘Passion Week,’’ and the Resurrection. Those 
who subordinate the climax of the work of Jesus 
in the Crucifixion and Resurrection, while seeking 
to exalt the teachings and personal qualities, must 
confess to treating the subject matter on a prin- 
ciple different from that of the Evangelists. For 
the proportion of their brief narratives devoted to 
the Passion and Triumph must, at least approxi- . 
mately, represent their estimate of their relative 
importance. 

Without putting any excessive emphasis on 
mere figures we may do well to see that of his 
twenty-eight chapters Matthew gives eight to this 
part of the story, Mark six of his sixteen, Luke 
four and a half of twenty-four, John ten of 
twenty-one: twenty-eight of a total of eighty-nine 
chapters. If we reckon actual space by pages, 
taking the text at hand, it is found that eleven and 
a half of thirty-three and a half in Matthew, eight 
and a half of twenty-one in Mark, eight plus of 
thirty-six in Luke, eleven of twenty-seven in John, 
tell this part of the story; or thirty-nine and a 
half of a total of one hundred seventeen and a 

119 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


half pages, or nearly thirty-four per cent. 
Further, we must take account of the stories of 
the birth and childhood, which are even more 
slurred by such critics as discount the closing 
facts of Jesus’ life. Thus we should deduct from 
the full story more than four and a half pages. 
In addition to this we should need to take account 
of the space given to John the Baptist’s work. 
The outcome would show that the Evangelists de- 
vote two-fifths of their account of the work and 
teaching of Jesus to the seven days of the climax 
in Jerusalem and the Resurrection appearances. 
There is no need for exaggeration to see that they 
must have reckoned the experiences and teachings 
of this climax as of major significance—an esti- 
mate which is most emphatically reaffirmed in the 
accounts of their preaching and procedure after 
the Ascension. 

The experiences and teachings of this period 
will rather naturally fall into four divisions. 
First are His free experiences and teachings in 
public, mainly in the temple on three days. These 
include contacts with the populace, with the Jewish 
officials, and most extensively with the various 
Jewish parties all of which set themselves to ham- 
per, embarrass and discredit Him, and gave Him 
occasion for some of His most direct and weighty 
words of authority and of judgment, as well as 
most incisive and far-reaching words about His 
Kingdom and human history. (For these we 
would study Matt. 21-23; Mark 11-12; Luke 19: 
29-21:4; John 12: 9-50.) 

Next are the experiences and teachings of Jesus 

120 


JEWS’ MESSIAH AND WORLD’S SAVIOR 


with His friends, usually with His enemies and 
the masses absent. These occasions gave oppor- 
tunity for intimate interpretations to part of 
which the next chapter must be devoted. They in- 
clude, of course, the so-called ‘‘Hischatological 
Discourses’’ of the Synoptics. (Matt. 24:1-26: 
46; Mark 13:1-14:42; Luke 21:5-22:46; John 
12:1-8 and 18-17.) 

Third, we have the experiences of Jesus in the 
hands of His enemies and the few pregnant words 
spoken by Him during these experiences. (Matt. 
96:47-27:66; Mark 14:43-15:47; Luke 22: 47- 
93:49, with seven additional verses telling of the 
burial of the Body by Joseph; John 18:1-19: 37, 
followed by the brief story of the burial by Joseph 
and Nicodemus). 

Finally there are the Resurrection accounts 
with which the final chapter of each of the Synop- 
tics and the last two in John are engaged. In the 
brief days of ‘‘Passion Week’’ what intense and 
varied experiences we find. How crowded and 
crammed the heart of the Master, and withal how 
wonderfully masterful He moves. Never once 
does He lose control of events, situations, men or 
circumstances, never is once put on the defensive 
even under the most determined, shrewd and cal- 
culated attacks of all His enemies. How much He 
did and said and experienced, and never became 
hurried, never lost poise. It all seems to move 
even as if it had been planned. When they finally 
take Him in Gethsemane He must needs urge them 
on to the act as they hesitate, while He calmly 
asks that His disciples be left alone, and turns 

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Himself over to their will, because back of, and 
even through, their will He sees the moving pur- 
pose of His Father and the progress of His pro- 
eram. 

We must read all the words and deeds of this 
final Jerusalem experience in the light of those 
numerous statements that reveal the prescience of 
Jesus and His determination to face His destiny 
and fulfill His work in the triple tragedy that is 
enacted in Jerusalem—the tragedy of sin in envy, 
hate, falsehood, betrayal, cruelty, murder; the 
tragedy of weakness in blindness, impotence, 
denial, unbelief; the tragedy of love in volun- 
tary acceptance of all the experience in behalf of 
those who imposed the tragedy upon Him. 

It was some months before the climax that His 
followers realized that ‘‘He (had) stedfastly set 
His face to go to Jerusalem,’’ although they did 
not at all comprehend that He was moving in the 
consciousness that ‘‘the days were being fulfilled 
that He should be received up’’ (Luke 9:51). 
Luke has rather carefully traced for us the marks 
of this steady purpose. He realized that He had 
come to cast fire upon the earth and longed for 
its kindling. But first there is for Him a baptism 
of bitterness and He is under constraint until it 
is experienced. He foresees the division and 
strife His saving work is to produce even in the 
most intimate relations of life. Deeper than all 
that conflict must His own struggle go, and His 
suffering lead the way. Only through tragedy can 
He win men and produce the Kingdom of redemp- 
tion (12:49-53). ‘‘He went on His way through 

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JEWS’ MESSIAH AND WORLD’S SAVIOR 


cities and villages, teaching and journeying on to 
Jerusalem’? (13:22), in connection with which 
statement Luke tells how questions arose out of 
the general, if vague, sensing of unusual events. 
Certain Pharisees came to advise Him to get out 
of Herod’s territory because Herod desired to kill 
Him. Jesus replied: ‘‘Go and tell that fox, Be- 
hold, I cast out demons and perform cures to-day 
and to-morrow, and the third day I end my 
course.’? Then He turned to the Pharisees to say 
that not Herod but Jerusalem, the Capital City, 
would slay Him, and He wept at the tragedy for 
the city (13:31 ff.). 

Again ‘‘as they were going on their way to 
Jerusalem’’ He healed the ten lepers and com- 
mented significantly on the ungrateful neglect of 
the nine Jewish lepers while only the Samaritan 
returned to thank Him (17:11 f.). The questions 
asked Him and His replies and parables were all 
now looking toward a consummation which all 
could feel, but which only He understood. 

As the end grew very near ‘‘He took unto Him 
the Twelve, and said unto them, Behold, we go up 
to Jerusalem, and all things that are written 
through the prophets shall be accomplished upon 
the Son of Man. For He shall be delivered unto 
the Gentiles, and shall be mocked and shamefully 
treated, and spit upon: and they shall scourge and 
Belem? (18331 ff. ): 

On the last stage of His going, when He was 
accepting the hospitality of Zaccheus at Jericho 
He explained that ‘‘the Son of Man came to seek 
and to save that which was lost. And as they 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


heard these things, He added and spoke a parable, 
because He was nigh to Jerusalem, and they sup- 
posed that the Kingdom of God was immediately 
to appear.’’ The parable was that of the noble- 
man who went into a distant country to receive a 
kingdom and gave the ten pounds to his servants 
to use until his return. ‘‘And when he had thus 
spoken, he went on before, going up to Jerusalem”’ 
(19: 1-28). 

John equally makes clear the deliberate fore- 
sight with which Jesus progresses to the culmina- 
tion of His labors. In it all He goes with the as- 
surance of His Father’s loving approval and of 
His own autonomy in His self-giving: He is laying 
down His life for His sheep; ‘‘Therefore doth 
My Father love me, because I lay down My life, 
that I may take it again. No one taketh it away 
from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have 
authority to lay it down, and I have authority to 
take it again. This commandment I received from 
My Father’’ (10:15-18). 

Of all that was done and said in the climax week 
it is not possible, nor is it necessary, for us 
here to speak. Postponing for the next chapter 
the intimate talk with the Twelve, we may find in 
John 12 the foundation for the revelations of 
Himself which Jesus gave in His contacts and 
interpretations at this time. And we may observe 
that in this one chapter we have all that John 
records of the contacts and conflicts leading up 
to the arrest and trials. 

1. It is good to begin with the social feast at 
Bethany given by ‘‘Simon the Leper,’’ at which 

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Mary anointed Him for His burial (1-11). It 
is an encouraging prelude to the strenuous week. 
Love and gratitude pay tribute to His grace and 
encouraged His spirit. Matthew and Mark pre- 
serve it also. Simon doubtless owed his healing 
to Jesus. Lazarus was there, not more than six 
weeks before called back from death. Martha was 
among the ministrants at the feast. Mary seized 
the opportunity to show her love and to make her 
tribute in a remarkable act, the aroma of whose 
sweetness, by the wish of the Lord, has attended 
the word of His grace into all the world and will 
to the end. For Jesus greatly appreciated it and 
interpreted it as prophetic of His burial. It would 
be a woman’s insight, quickened by love and 
guided by an intuitive sensing of the outcome of 
hatred in conflict, with her limitless devotion, that 
would foresee the death and anticipate the anoint- 
ing for which opportunity might be wholly lacking 
in the violence which she foresaw. For was not 
the sinister shadow of Satan’s rage over even this 
scene of appreciative service, in the grumbling of 
Judas about the ‘‘waste.’’ At all events, Jesus 
relates it definitely to His burial. For Him now 
all things relate to His death. 

The presence of Jesus soon became known and 
became the chief interest of ‘‘the common people’’ 
and the chief concern of ‘‘the chief priests.’? The 
curious wanted to see Jesus but even more to ‘‘see 
Lazarus who had been raised from the dead,’’ and 
the priests went so far as to consider sending 
Lazarus back to the dead, ‘‘ because that by reason 
of him many of the Jews went away, and believed 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


on Jesus.’? We see how Jesus was the revealer 
of all men’s hearts. Truly ‘‘for judgment He was 
in the world,’’? however much His heart’s con- 
cern makes Him say (12:48): ‘‘I came not to 
judge the world, but to save the world.’’ 

2. ‘‘The Triumphal Entry’’ into Jerusalem 
(12-16) is the practically universal title for the 
incident next in our passage, and has been for 
centuries. Yet how is it possible to look beneath 
the surface, in the least degree, and find any ele- 
ment of ‘‘triumph’’ in Jesus’ experience in riding 
into the Holy City at the head of this kindly 
hearted multitude? Almost every feature of it 
speaks of spiritual tragedy. There were kind, 
believing and loving souls crying their ‘‘hosan- 
nas,’’ and ‘‘out of the mouths of babes and suck- 
lings’? God was ‘‘perfecting praise’’ for His Son. 
But what were even these friendly, trusting souls 
expecting in ‘‘the King of Israel’’ they hailed, 
and how many of the children in manhood and 
womanhood would crown ‘‘the Son of David’’ in 
their hearts to reign over their lives? 

The three comments John is led to make upon 
the incident, looking back from a long distance, 
help us to get it in right perspective. He says 
that ‘‘the followers’’ of Jesus did not now under- 
stand the relation to the scriptures in Zechariah, 
but connected them with the facts only ‘‘when 
Jesus was glorified’’; that the multitude, to be 
sure, ‘‘bare witness’’ to Him, but that they were 
drawn by their excited interest over the raising 
of Lazarus; and that the Pharisees were only dis- 
tressed because they were accomplishing nothing 

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JEWS’ MESSIAH AND WORLD’S SAVIOR 


to destroy His popularity, for ‘‘lo, the world is 
gone after Him,”’ calling for more plotting unto 
desperation against Him on their part. 

How then ought we to regard this misnamed 
‘‘Triumphal Entry’’? How else than as the for- 
mal offering of Himself to the Jewish people as 
their promised Messianic King? The severely 
simple, almost sordid, manner of it was to reém- 
phasize the teaching of all His ministry that His 
was not to be a reign of might, a display of gran- 
deur, nor a rule of force. He came ‘‘lowly and 
riding upon an ass,’’ the carrier and carriage of 
a peaceful monarch, manifesting the simplicity of 
spirit of one who came to share and meet the 
needs of humanity. If He could have been re- 
ceived on His own terms in His own true char- 
acter, as King of men’s lives in spiritual rule of 
righteousness and reverence, the cross might have 
been avoided. Human nature was here showing 
the depths of depravity that called for the cross. 
He had no illusion about the outcome. Yet it was 
no make-believe, but a sincere offer of Himself— 
an offer needful to fulfill all God’s promises and 
to establish His righteousness. It stands to-day 
as His rebuke of the demand of Jews then, as well 
as of the ambition of men to-day, for glory, honor, 
display, might, imperialism in the reign of the 
Christ. 

It is in full keeping with this interpretation of 
the incident that it is His first approach to and 
entrance into the city upon this final fateful visit. 
Succeeding days will be marked by conflicts be- 
tween Him and all the parties and officials of His 

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people. First of all He gives them one more 
chance to see Him as the Deliverer and King, one 
more chance to accept Him. 

In these succeeding days He will meet every 
sort of jibe and thrust, argument and ridicule, 
snare and assault, from Pharisee and Sadducee, 
from zealot and lawgiver. He will reply in ques- 
tions that startle, confuse and silence; in parables 
that expose and condemn while they hold solemn 
warning and powerful persuasion; finally in a 
sevenfold series of woes upon ‘‘scribes and 
Pharisees, hypocrites.’’ His parables reach a 
climax in that of ‘‘the wicked husbandmen’’ who 
scouted the householder, insulted, maltreated and 
slew his servants, and killed his son to appro- 
priate the vineyard for themselves. Then He 
went on to apply it by citing the psalm about the 
stone rejected by the builders that became ‘‘the 
head of the corner’’; and closed by saying quite 
plainly : ‘‘Therefore say I unto you, the Kingdom 
of God shall be taken away from you and given 
to a people [not nation as in our translations] 
producing its [true and appropriate] fruits. He 
that falleth on this stone shall be broken to pieces: 
but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will scatter him 
as dust.’’ Matthew says ‘‘the chief priests and 
Pharisees’’ understood the application and would 
have arrested Him on the spot but for fear of the 
masses who reckoned Jesus ‘‘as a prophet’’—not 
the Messiah (see Matt. 21: 23-46). 

At the close of the ‘‘woes’’ (Matt. 23) Jesus 
shows how the attitude of the leaders to Him 
amounts to confession that they ‘‘are sons of them 

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JEWS’ MESSIAH AND WORLD’S SAVIOR 


that slew the prophets,’’ and boldly places Him- 
self in the position of maker and controller of 
**prophets, wise men and scribes’? whom He will 
send ‘‘unto them,’’ but whom they will ‘‘kill and 
crucify, and scourge and hound from city to city”? 
bringing upon ‘‘this generation’’ “‘all the right- 
eous blood shed on the earth’’ from Abel to Zach- 
ariah. We cannot fairly face words like these 
without seeing Jesus assuming the highest prerog- 
atives and responsibilities of the Supreme Repre- 
sentative of the Holy and Sovereign God and func- 
tions committed to no man in the history of rev- 
elation. 

Moreover we witness in the progress to the city 
in this ‘‘Entry’’ a compassion, a yearning, an an- 
guish of grief that call for some adequate ex- 
planation. As He came along the road from 
Bethany rounding the Mount of Olives the city 
came to view, resplendent in the reflection of the 
morning sun from gilded roof and tower of the 
temple on the Hill of Zion. How much it all 
meant to Him now. ‘‘He wept over it saying: If 
thou didst know in this day, even thou, the things, 
that make for peace! But now they are hid from 
thine eyes.’? Then He sketched in terrible, brief 
outline the destruction of the city ‘‘because thou 
didst not recognize the opportunity of thy visita- 
tion’’ (Luke 19; 41-44). This lament becomes yet 
more impressive and interpretative if we connect 
it with two others. First, in Luke 13:34 f., when 
He had announced to ‘‘certain Pharisees’? who 
pretended to warn Him against Herod that no 
prophet could ‘‘perish outside Jerusalem,’’ His 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


heart burst forth: ‘‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that 
killeth the prophets and stoneth them that are 
sent unto her! how often would I have gathered 
thy children together, even as a hen her own brood 
under her wings, and ye would not!’’ Again, Mat- 
thew (23:37-39) gives this same lament as the 
closing public utterance of the Lord in the temple 
before He goes out for the last time. That He 
repeated it thus is not difficult to believe and is 
the more plausible when we note that Luke re- 
cords two such laments; and they all reveal the 
estimate Jesus is placing upon Himself as He 
comes to the city for this final test of the attitude 
which the people and the nation will take toward 
Him. It is their salvation if they accept, their 
doom if they reject. And they are typically 
human, but with a thousand years of preparation 
for this crisis. If they reject Him human nature 
must have the power and potency of His sacri- 
ficial, mediatorial death. Humanity reveals itself 
as Jesus interprets Himself in its presence. 

In this connection we must not overlook the 
cleansing of the temple. John has recorded a sim- 
ilar act at the first visit to Jerusalem after Jesus’ 
baptism (John 2:13-22), for apparently John 
intends for us so to understand the time and cir- 
cumstances. Certainly the Synoptics teach that 
He did cleanse it on the day of the ‘‘Hintry,’’ as- 
serting His sovereignty over His Father’s House 
of Prayer. 

3. John next introduces us to an incident of 
one of the days in the temple which he alone has 
preserved, and which is most significant in Jesus” 

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JEWS’ MESSIAH AND WORLD’S SAVIOR 


interpreting of Himself (20-36). John makes no 
distinction of the days and devotes only this chap- 
ter to the temple experiences. 

The request of ‘‘certain Greeks’’ to ‘‘see 
Jesus’’ led to an expression and experience of His 
not surpassed in all the evangelic story for sig- 
nificance. These Greeks were among those who 
had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and so were 
what Luke, in Acts, calls ‘‘God-fearing men.”’ It 
is interesting—it may be significant—that it was 
Philip to whom they made their polite request to 
be introduced to his Master, and that Philip, in 
doubt what to do in the unusual matter, went to 
Andrew for consultation. Both names are Greek 
—meaning horse-lover and gentleman—which in- 
dicates that they might be men of broader sym- 
pathies than the average Jew. They go to Jesus 
with the request. 

His response must have startled them and puz- 
zled them. Evidently it very greatly stirred Him. 
Apparently it stimulated Him to a fresh and high 
consciousness of the hopeful outcome of His self- 
sacrifice. It was for this that the Greeks are in- 
troduced into the story. We are not even told 
whether Jesus received them. We surely have no 
doubt, but the point of the story takes a remark- 
able turn, with several instructive items. Jesus 
hailed the request as a note of the hour for the 
glorification of ‘‘the Son of Man.’’ But it does 
not divert His mind an instant from the need for 
death. Rather He uses the occasion to teach 
afresh and with striking clarity and emphasis the 
principle of His working—life through death. 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


With the double amen jf vigorous emphasis He 
points out that the unplanted grain of wheat re- 
mains just itself, while that which goes in the soil 
produces much fruit. Applying His simile, He 
says that the man who is concerned to save his 
merely human life loses it, while he who hates the 
this-world life may be guarding it for the life 
eternal. There are two words in the Greek text 
for life: gvyy psuché and fay zoe. Hternal 
life differs from this-world life in quality and 
therefore in duration. Simply to keep on breath- 
ing, no matter how healthily and contentedly, 
may not be to ‘‘live.’? What are the years of a 
Methuselah if continued existence is all they sig- 
nify? There is a way of life that transmutes liv- 
ing into life and makes it inherently ‘‘eternal.”’ 
And Jesus calls the man who would reckon him- 
self His servant to follow His ideal and stand 
with Him. ‘‘Where J [emphatic] am, there also 
shall My servant be,’’ and He was at that moment 
under the shadow and meaning of the cross. 
“His Father will honor the man who honors this 
Son of His.’? We cannot honor Him unless we 
approve in practice His ideal of life. 

If we follow up His use of the term life (of this 
world) we shall find Him saying in verse 27: 
‘‘Now is my life torn to pieces.’’ The words also 
easily translate as in the ordinary versions. In 
any case they express the extreme stress of soul. 
We should include two sentences in the question, 
not one as in most versions, thus: ‘‘And what 
shall I say? Father, save me from this hour?’’ 
Shall He ask that He be spared the tearing out 

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JEWS’ MESSIAH AND WORLD’S SAVIOR 


of His life as He takes rinful humanity into His 
heart? Shall He seek to be let off with an easier 
way of producing the fruit of redemption in the 
soil of human nature? May He in any case aban- 
don humanity without dying with it that it may 
live in Him? Now that He has shown men a per- 
fect example of self-giving living must He admit 
that they cannot follow and that He cannot stop 
short of death for those who will slay Him? He 
answers His question. First, He cannot ask to be 
let off, ‘‘But this is why I came to this crisis 
hour’’; then this one request: ‘‘Father, glorify 
Thy name,’’ by making My death fruitful in life 
for men. 

We cannot wonder that the Father answered 
with strong assurance. ‘‘He has already glorified 
His name in His Son’s life, and He will glorify it 
yet,’’? in the manner prayed for. To the puzzled 
people, discussing whether the word they heard 
was thunder or the speech of angels, Jesus, whose 
spirit caught the message fully, explained that 
the voice was ‘‘for their sakes.’’ It is a judgment 
hour for this world. Its ruler is to be hurled out 
of it. It is not possible certainly to say whether 
Jesus refers to the rejection and murder of the 
rightful Ruler of the world, or to the overthrow 
through His death of the usurping ruler. The 
first would seem better to fit the whole context. 
In either case Jesus turns to speak of His cruci- 
fixion with the assurance of His Father’s word: 
‘‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, shall 
draw all men unto Myself.’? He, no doubt, re- 
ferred to the lifting up on the cross. Beyond that 

133 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


lay the lifting up ‘‘out of the earth’’ in the Resur- 
rection; and then the lifting up above the earth’s 
sordid condition and base ideals through the mes- 
sage and the living of His believers. Thus un- 
swerving and unafraid He goes to ‘‘fall into the 
earth’’ for all men. It was the coming to Him 
in this critical hour of the Greeks that gave Him 
this vision of ‘‘all men’’ drawn to Himself. The 
Greeks stood for the whole heathen world at the 
moment. The attraction of the cross was the 
vision of His insight, the ground of His confi- 
dence. 

4. The people got enough understanding of 
His words to know that He was talking of dying. 
They raised a question which showed how far they 
were from His insight. If He is the Christ— 
and such they now see He seems to be claiming to 
be—‘‘the Christ,’’ according to the scriptures, 
“fabideth forever.’’ What then is He talking of 
by such words? Who is ‘‘the Son of Man’’ about 
whom He so often speaks? They had understood 
Him to mean Himself; but now it must be some 
other? Jesus replies only indirectly by a chal- 
Jenge that they (all of us) take advantage of the 
Light while we have it. One may be pardoned for 
introducing a childhood memory with a life-long 
meaning. The great old family Bible, probably 
10 x 14 inches, whose pictures, pages and passages 
I pored over and pondered, had very thick covers, 
deeply indented with beveled depressions. The 
sections thus made were ornamented with texts in 
gold letters. Two of them stick in my memory. 
One was ‘‘Search the Scriptures.’’ It was the 

134 


JEWS’ MESSIAH AND WORLD’S SAVIOR 


other that was imbedded in my soul and associates 
itself with that Bible and with the mother who 
taught me to read it as God’s word. 

It was the words of verse 36 in this passage: 
‘““While ye have the Light, believe in the Light, 
that ye may be children of the Light.’’ 

5. A paragraph follows next telling of the reac- 
tion to Jesus; how notwithstanding His many 
signs most did not believe on Him, could not, in 
fact, believe, for Isaiah’s description is true, that 
pictures the hardened heart and blinded eyes of 
men; how some even of the rulers believed, but: 
would not confess Him because of their fear of 
excommunication—believed but did not trust: 
(37-43). 

6. Then John’s last word concerning the open: 
ministry of Jesus (4450). ‘‘Jesus cried and: 
said’’ words that identified Him with His Father 
in saving grace, words that invited faith in Him 
that men might know God. He has come to be 
this world’s Light, that men may no longer walk 
in darkness. Those who will not hear His sayings 
in faith He will not judge, for He ‘‘came not to 
judge the world, but to save the world.’’ Yet His 
coming will issue in Judgment for unbelievers, for 
‘“in the last day’’ the word of Jesus will condemn 
the unbeliever. His words are the commandment 
of His Father, given faithfully and unerringly, 
and are, therefore, eternal life. 

It is a good word with which to end the record 
of this ministry. Jesus has said wonderful things 
in the incidents here recorded. He has linked 
with a perpetual proclamation of His gospel the 

135 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


deed of Mary in anointing Him for burial, thus 
making His death the heart of the Gospel of the 
Kingdom forever. He has laid down a law of 
life through death as the law of all human realiza- 
tion. He has made a man’s standing with God 
to turn on the man’s attitude toward Himself. 
He has heard His Father pledge Him success in 
His sacrificial death, and has predicted a uni- 
versal attraction for His cross. He has passed 
judgment on the Hebrew nation and pronounced 
the doom of its sacred capital and the destruction 
of its temple of worship. He had made His min- 
istry and message the touchstone of destiny for 
all who come under His words. In it all His heart 
has wrung with a passion more than pity, a yearn- 
ing of infinite love that comes to its pause preach- 
ing ‘‘eternal life.’’ 


136 


CHAPTER IX 


IN THE UPPER ROOM WITH THE TWELVE JESUS PRO- 
JECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT (John 13-17) 


Jesus clearly aimed not so much to do a work 
as to inaugurate an enterprise. This is evident 
so soon as one takes serious account of His min- 
istry as a whole. Even if His own unerring in- 
sight had not discerned this true method He would 
have found it well defined for Him in His Bible. 
Isa. 49 and 52:13-53:12, and Ps. 22 give almost 
a detailed outline of the plan by which He worked 
and which He turned over to His Apostles and 
His church to carry on and carry out ‘‘in His 
name.’’ These scriptures we know from His own 
words were part of His personal scriptures. And 
every Christian has his personal Bible gathered 
out of the Bible as experience, insight and 
study advance. It was not otherwise with the 
Christ. 

The first thirteen verses of Isa. 49 so com- 
pletely outline the experience and method of Jesus 
that if it were possible critics would beyond ques- 
tion decide that they were written after Christ. 
Jehovah’s Servant calls the isles and distant 
peoples (i.e., all humanity) to hear while He out- 
lines Jehovah’s plan and pledge. ‘‘Called from 
the womb,’’ His name is mentioned from ‘‘the 
bowels of His mother.’? Compare ‘‘Thou shalt 

137 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


call His name Jesus for He it is that shall save 
His people from their sins.’’? He is most carefully 
selected and guarded and brought to use at just 
the right time. Jehovah designates Him ‘‘Prince 
of God’’ (translation of Zsrael in verse 3) in 
whom Jehovah is to be glorified. Yet in actual 
experience He finds the outcome of His ministry 
so small and discouraging as to lead Him to say 
that it has been a useless expenditure of strength, 
a fruitless labor. Still He claims fidelity and ap- 
peals to His God for vindication. How perfectly 
this fits the experience of Jesus the least reflection 
will show. Of all the hundreds of thousands who 
professed following He is able to find never more 
than from five to six hundred to meet Him after 
rising from death and sending invitations to His 
friends to meet Him on a mountain in Galilee. 
(See Matt. 28:16f.; I Cor. 15:5). There were 
‘about a hundred and twenty’’ to see His ascen- 
sion and wait at Jerusalem for the Power of Pen- 
tecost and to take up the work of witnessing. To 
His plaint of failure Jehovah replies to His Ser- 
vant that this is only the first stage, the beginning 
which is to reach out now and include all men: 
“‘T will also give Thee for a light to the nations, 
that Thou mayest be My Salvation unto the end of 
the earth. Thus saith Jehovah, the Redeemer of 
Israel, his Holy One, to Him whom man despiseth, 
to Him whom the [His] nation abhorreth, to a 
servant of rulers: Kings shall see and arise; 
princes, and they shall worship, because of 
Jehovah that is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, 
who hath chosen Thee.’’ The section continues 
138 


JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


with further details of assurance and promise that 
they shall come to His Servant from furthest 
lands (west), from north and south, ‘‘and these 
from the land of Sinim [Chinese?].’’ 

All are familiar with the fifty-third of Isaiah. 
The chapter should begin (as the paragraph so 
manifestly does) at 52:13. Thus read the ulti- 
mate glory and honor of Jehovah’s ‘‘wise Ser- 
vant,’? when He will startle (not ‘‘sprinkle’’) 
many nations and receive the abashed homage of 
kings, is most strikingly seen to follow a period 
- when He has astonished them with His humility 
and lack of pretentions, when He was humiliated 
and ‘‘led as a lamb to the slaughter,’’ and ‘‘cut 
off out of the land of the living for the trans- 
gression of My people to whom the stroke was 
due.’’ He is to ‘‘see the travail of His soul and 
be satisfied,’’ because ‘‘by the knowledge of Him- 
self’? He is to ‘‘make many righteous.”’ 

In the mist of the agony of the cross at the dark- 
est moment of the consciousness of the blind re- 
jection and the ribald raillery of the people for 
whom He was dying Jesus quotes aloud the first 
phrase of Ps. 22, in the Hebrew: ‘‘Hi, Kh, lama 
sabachthani?’’—‘‘My God, My God, why hast 
thou forsaken Me?’’ (Matt. 27:46.) Hence we 
may know how He undergirded His spirit by this 
entire psalm, and how He interpreted Himself in 
its light. The details of description of His experi- 
ences on the cross in the first twenty-one verses 
are amazing. Then follows in five verses His ex- 
pression of confidence and faithfulness in His 
purpose. Then a closing paragraph gives the 

139 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS | 


assurance of Jehovah of the wide, complete suc- 
cess of His undertaking to rescue the world. 
Other psalms and other prophecies might be cited 
as helping to formulate the consciousness of Jesus 
as He came to His crisis and endured it, but these 
sufficiently illustrate the thought. 

For the night of the betrayal He evidently 
planned deliberately, and, in view of all the facts, 
very skillfully to have several hours with the 
Twelve alone around the Passover table and under 
the olives of Gethsemane. The Passover was 
kept by them in the ‘‘large upper room’’ of the 
house of some man whom we may think of as a 
well-to-do friend of Jesus. It is open to each man 
to make his own guess at the details of the prepa- 
ration. I prefer to think that Jesus had privately 
arranged with His friend for the use of the room. 
It would aid in securing privacy—a very diffi- 
cult thing for Him—if no others knew of the ar- 
rangement. At the proper time Jesus sent two 
of the T'welve to make the preparation, the friend 
providing only the room and the necessary fur- 
niture. Going by the fountain where servants 
came for water the two would see a man come 
for water. This was a very unusual thing. 
Women were the water carriers. This friend had 
a man-servant to do it, probably the only one go- 
ing to that fountain. Him the two would follow 
and thus locate the room and make the needed 
preparation. At the evening hour Jesus and the 
Twelve went in quietly, possibly not all together, 
and assembled about their table for the Passover 
which Jesus says He had earnestly desired to eat 

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JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


with them before He should suffer’ (Luke 22:15). 
Thus they were together for some hours. Judas 
was eliminated after efforts ef Jesus, that arouse 
greatest admiration for their delicacy and gentle- 
ness, to give him opportunity to reconsider his 
perfidy. They continued to converse until it was 
time to leave the room. We may find two good 
reasons for ‘‘going out’’ (John 14:31). Cer- 
tainly Jesus wished to go to His often used prayer 
place in Gethsemane. But also He wished further 
talk with the Eleven. Judas would, get all ar- 
rangements completed and come with the officers, 
of both Jews and Romans, probably to the*room 
first. By going out at the opportune time the 
party seeking Him would be delayed and time 
would be gained for further conference and 
prayer before Judas, taking advantage of His 
knowledge of Jesus’ habit of prayer in Gethsem- 
ane (John 18:2), should come upon Him with the 
officers and the mob. This seems far more reason- 
able than to suppose that John has jumbled the 
talk and put the departure from the room at an 
impossible place in the narrative, as many do (see 
especially Dr. Vedder in his generally very fine 
work on John and the Johannine Writings). 

The fullest report of that high and holy night 
is found in John’s Gospel. To it he devotes five 
chapters. 

It is a bold undertaking to try to present in one 
brief study these five chapters, impossible if de- 
tailed exposition should be undertaken. It is 
important that they be treated as a whole. Only 
thus can we get their movement and see their 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


central, constructive idea. Every Christian 
knows ‘‘the fourteenth chapter of John’’—he 
thinks he does—and most of us can begin quoting 
it at once. Yet very few would be able to give 
offhand much, if anything, beyond the eleventh 
verse. Many know verse twenty-seven, but would 
not be at all sure of its location. Yet it is only 
at verse twelve that the real subject, the chief con- 
cern of Jesus in the chapter, comes to us. There 
ean be no accurate understanding of the great 
interest of Jesus on this wonder evening unless 
one makes a full study of all five chapters. It is 
especially important that we begin with chapter 
13, which relatively few seem at all definitely 
to counect with this Upper Room Talk. One of 
our ablest writers and interpreters recently in 
Sunday School Expositions dwelt on the Dis- 
course, undertaking to call attention to the entire 
address, and entirely omitted the first chapter of 
it 

The subject most popular for this Talk for cen- 
turies has been ‘‘Jesus Comforting His Dis- 
ciples.’’ That element is certainly found here, 
but it is subsidiary to the main purpose. Jesus is 
preparing His Apostles to succeed Him as King- 
dom Builder, to take His ideas, His objective, 
His plan, His death and resurrection,—to take 
Himself,—out into the world and set this force to 
work in the regeneration of the human race, for 
its reconstruction into a ‘‘new humanity.’’ He is 
taking these ‘‘friends’’ whom He has chosen and 
leading them into all the program which the 
Father has made known unto Him (see 15:13-16). 

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JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


It is for this purpose He ‘‘chose them, and ap- 
pointed them; that they should go, and bear fruit, 
and that their fruit should abide.’’ Then He adds, 
as summing it all up: ‘‘That whatsoever ye shall 
ask of the Father in My name, He may give it to 
you.’’ He makes them His complete representa- 
tives—that alone exhausts the meaning of ‘‘in my 
name.’? As they thus represent Him on earth 
they will have authority to represent Him in 
drafts on His all-powerful Father for supplies for 
every need. 

Our effort now must be to discover the chief 
topics of the Talk of this night. It is not a formal 
address but familiar talk. It cannot be analyzed 
into separate topics, moving steadily to a climax. 
The same topics will recur at different stages of 
the evening’s progress. Jesus would introduce 
some subject, then drop it for another, later to re- 
vert to it. Yet certain items emerge as chief 
terms in the instructions, directions and pledges 
which He is giving to them. The occasion was 
most suitable, most impressive. They knew that 
the supreme crisis was at hand. They did not at 
all comprehend its form or its outcome. Yet they 
would be very receptive and would recall what 
was now said for use in the days to come when 
they could understand and apply it. 

1. His first emphasis is on the spirit which 
must rule in them as His friends and representa- 
tives. It must be the spirit of humility and of 
service. This must be produced and mediated by 
a love of one another which will bind them to- 
gether in a unity, free from all selfishness and 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


every form of self-preferment. This is the first 
topic, and to it He recurs in almost every section 
of the discourse, stressing it with the utmost 
emphasis. He even puts this plea on the basis of 
‘fa new commandment,’’ that they shall love one 
another; ‘‘Even as I have loved you, that ye also 
love one another. By this shall all men know that 
ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to an- 
other.’’ 

They were not long in giving Him occasion for 
this teaching after they had come together. 
Luke’s plain exposure explains more fully the 
cause of the washing of their feet at the table 
(22: 24): ‘‘There arose a contention among them, 
which of them was accounted to be greatest.’’ 
This was an old contention among them. It seems 
shameful for it to arise at this meeting which was 
so meaningful. Jesus heard the words, whispered 
though they may have been. Already He knew 
the ambitions in their hearts. He waited for the 
expression of it. Getting up from the table, He 
laid aside His long outer robe, girded a long towel 
about His waist, filled the basin with water, and 
without a word began bathing the feet of the 
disciples. Amazed and abashed as they were, no 
one spoke until He reached Peter, who questioned 
Him. Jesus postponed until later any explana- 
tion, whereupon Peter declared vehemently that 
the Master should never wash His feet. To this 
Jesus replied: ‘‘If I wash thee not, thou hast no 
part with Me.’’ Peter missed the point entirely 
and now impetuously said that if it came to that 
he was ready for a bath from head to foot, ‘‘head 

144 


JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


and hands as well as feet.’? Jesus then went 
straight to the seat of the trouble in them. They 
had all taken a bath before leaving their lodgings 
for the Passover room. On the way only their 
feet had become soiled. There was no servant at 
the door to wash the dust off as they slipped their 
feet out of the sandals. Some one of them should 
have offered to do this service. Possibly any 
one of them would have been willing to do this 
for the Master. But the occasion is too big with 
possibilities for any one of them to risk humbling 
himself now. Kingdom offices may be assigned 
this night. If one offered to bathe His feet he 
might be embarrassed not to go further, yet to 
wash a fellow disciple’s feet would be to confess 
inferiority and make a bid for secondary honors 
under the Kingdom régime. So all went un- 
washed to the table. 

Jesus replied to Peter that any one who had had 
his bath needed only the washing of his feet to 
be wholly clean. Then with a subtle spiritual turn 
He added: ‘‘ And ye are clean, but not all.’? The 
shadow of Judas was clouding His heart. The 
words would be an invitation, as well as a re- 
buke, to the Traitor. Taking His place again at 
the table and waiting for all eyes to look inquiry, 
He explained the act and pressed the lesson. To 
share His work and Kingdom a man must share 
His spirit, for He must be able to send a man out 
with such spirit and such expression that receiv- 
ing him will mean receiving the Master and God 
who sent the Master. Christ’s man must link up 
in a unity with Christ and God. Here is the 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


center of His method for winning the world—God, 
Christ, the believer, wrought into a unity in 
this world by the love of the Holy Spirit. And it 
is only the believer that the world sees, physically. 
How dreadful! How glorious! How it burns 
out all self, and burns in the brand-marks of the 
Christ! Thus Chapter 13. And the idea is not 
left behind through all the night. 

2. The first eleven verses of Chapter 14, 
especially, stress the necessity for accepting Jesus 
as the truly complete, unique representative of 
God the Father for humanity. If we believe in 
God we must believe alsoin Him. He is the Way 
to God, the way of God, the way of a godly man. 
If one wishes to know what a true man on his way 
to God is like here He is. He is the Truth of God, 
of man, of religion, of duty, of world interpreta- 
tion. If one wishes to know how he shall think to 
think truly let him learn the consciousness of 
Jesus—His God-consciousness, His world-con- 
sciousness, His sin-consciousness, His destiny- 
consciousness. He is the Life, the life of all that 
lives, the eternal life of all that shall live. It is 
not in jealous exclusiveness that He says: ‘‘No 
man cometh unto the Father but by Me,’’ as if 
He is unwilling for any one to find His own way, 
or be led by another. It is because He alone 
knows and shows the Father; for there is no sal- 
vation in any other, His being ‘‘the only name 
under heaven given among men whereby we must 
be saved’’ (Acts 4:12). 

He is, therefore, most eager that men shall see 
the Father in Him. Philip says, ‘‘Lord, show us 

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JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


the Father and it satisfies us,’’ and grieves his 
Lord that after so much association Philip does 
not yet know Him. He longs for the faith that 
identifies Him in character with the Father. He 
desires the faith of spiritual insight. But if one 
cannot yet rise to that, let him support his faith 
by observing the works of Jesus, for they are the 
works which God alone could do or would do. In 
any case He pleads for faith that He is in the 
Father and the Father in Him. It is because men 
must know His Father that He is here to show 
them the nature of His Father and to awaken 
faith in Him. 

3. Next He proceeds once more to a theme so 
often on His lips, the place of the Believer in His 
work and plan. All the talk of the evening circu- 
lates about that center. He has been leading up 
to that. He will build about that in all else He has 
to say. Its most succinct, condensed statement 
is in 14: 12-15: ‘‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He 
that believeth in Me, the works that I do shall he 
do also; and greater works than these shall he do; 
because I go unto the Father. And whatsoever ye 
shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the 
Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall 
ask anything in My name, that will I do. If ye 
love Me, ye will keep my commandments.’’ Here 
it all is in a nut-shell. He has begun a work and 
made possible the doing of it. Believers in Him 
will both be able and responsible for doing the 
major part of the work He has undertaken; and if 
they love Him they will do it. He goes to the 
Father and from that position works with those 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


who labor ‘‘in His name,’’ releasing the divine 
energy in ways that multiply His working pres- 
ence and distribute it in His workers every- 
where. 

4. In the face of this assignment to His friends 
of the ‘‘greater works’’ of His Kingdom enter- 
prise Jesus naturally passes to the promise of the 
Holy Spirit to enable them in wisdom, energy 
and spiritual unity with God and all other be- 
lievers. The teaching concerning the Holy Spirit 
features largely in all the rest of the Dis- 
course. The most extensive parts being at 
14: 16-24 and 16: 7-15, with the characteristic, de- 
terminative function of the Spirit stated in 
15: 26-27. He comes as the Spirit of Truth to 
bear witness to Jesus along with His followers 
who are ‘‘also to bear witness.’’ 

It is unfortunate that the Greek name of 
the Holy Spirit has come so widely into our 
English translations as ‘‘Comforter.’’ Efforts 
to avoid this narrowing of the Spirit’s func- 
tion to correspond with our thought of com- 
fort in bereavement or other distress, by trans- 
literation of the Greek word—Paraclete—do not 
help much except for Greek scholars. We really 
have no English term with the connotation of 
the Greek. The word is a verbal adjective and 
means the ‘‘One-Who-May-Be-Called,’’ or equally 
the ‘‘One-whose-function-is-to-call.’? The thought 
will vary in shade according to the circumstances 
of the believer. The Holy Spirit may ‘‘comfort,”’ 
‘‘help,’’ ‘‘challenge,’’ ‘‘arouse,’’ ‘‘stimulate,’’ 
‘fenable.’’ No one word being equal to suggesting 

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JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


all these functions, it is important for Chris- 
tians to study the subject and in prayerful experi- 
ence learn the ‘‘fellowship of the Spirit’’ in His 
many relations. In them all His one concern and 
activity is to ‘‘take the things of Jesus and show 
them unto us,’’ ‘‘to glorify the Christ’? never 
‘‘speaking from Himself’? (16: 13-14). 

He is to be sent by the Father (14:16), and by 
the Son (16:7), and to come of Himself (15: 26). 
It is important to observe that He is to come unto, 
upon, into believers—witnessing believers and, 
coming unto them, ‘‘to convict the world of sin, 
of righteousness and of judgment’’ (16:8). He 
must come to the friends of Jesus because ‘‘the 
world cannot receive Him because it does not see 
Him [by physical sensation] and does not know 
Him [by spiritual sense]’’ (14:17). Hence if 
Jesus is to get at, and get into, the world it must be 
through the friends of Jesus. Of course Jesus 
does not here mean to exclude that direct work in 
the souls of sinners of which we read in Acts. 
But we must keep in mind that He does this at the 
same time He works in some human witness with 
the gospel message. 

His first work in the believer is to build up in 
him unity with the Father and the Son, to make 
him an abiding place for the Christ and His 
Father. For all this a genuine, vital love of the 
Christ is necessary (14:18 ff.). 

Jesus expresses disappointment (14: 25-31 and 
16:5-7) that the Eleven do not now trust Him 
more and ask Him where He is going. There is 
nothing for them to fear or over which to be 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


troubled. He is at peace and wishes to impart His 
peace to them. If they had assumed that His 
plan was right and good and taken a trustful 
attitude it would have been easier for Him to ex- 
plain to them. Their minds and hearts would 
have been more receptive. But they have felt that 
of course it is bad for them if He is to be taken 
away, and ‘‘sorrow hath filled their hearts.’’ 
‘‘Nevertheless,’’ He says, ‘‘I tell you the truth,”’ 
even unasked, ‘‘it is expedient for you that I go 
away’’ (16:5-7). For at least two reasons this 
is true. It is better to have Christ spiritually 
within one than physically with one; and it is 
better to be made a faithful witness for the in- 
dwelling Christ than to be permitted to be a 
happy associate of Christ. Both these things the 
Spirit realizes in us for our Lord. 

5. Jesus devotes a large part of Chapter 15 to 
emphasizing His dependence on His friends for 
effecting the purpose of His presence in the world: 
glorifying His Father. This He does under 
the Parable of the Vine and its Branches, pass- 
ing on to direct speech after dropping the figure. 

He is the true vine planted by the Father. His 
friends are the branches, on which alone the fruit 
of the vine is borne. All the Father’s concern and 
eare are that they bear much fruit. ‘‘ Herein is the 
Father glorified’? and that glorifying of the 
Father is always the highest note in the aims of 
Jesus. To this end He has chosen, protected, 
taught, appointed us, and has put us into such re- 
lations to God that we may command all the re- 
sources of the Infinite to realize His purpose. 

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JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


To this end we must ‘‘abide in Him’’ for ‘‘apart 
from Him we can do nothing.’’ For this end we 
must bear any hatred of the world, as also any 
pruning of fruitless branches by the Father’s 
husbandry. How earnestly Jesus seeks to make 
this fruitfulness of His followers a consuming 
purpose and passion. 

6. We must go to the Synopties for one chief 
incident of the evening. John introduces the 
thought of it, but not the actual founding of ‘‘the 
Memorial Supper.’’ Luke gives us the best 
glimpse of the emotional intensity of Jesus’ inter- 
est init. He is pouring out His blood and giving 
His body ‘‘for many for the remission of sins’”’ 
(Luke 22: 14-23; Matt. 26: 26-29; Mark 14: 22-25). 
Thus He gave to His followers a picture of His 
self-giving. He elevated His death into the cen- 
tral place in the institutional life of His following. 
His self-giving was for Him the blood of a New 
Covenant of God with humanity, a covenant be- 
tween Himself and His Church, an abiding testi- 
mony of His love and life and of our dependence 
upon Him. As the living Father sent Him and He 
lives because of the Father so all who eat His flesh 
and drink His blood, in the sense of spirit and life, 
these live because of Him (John 6: 54-65). 

7. Init all Jesus is not losing sight of the heavy 
strain of faith, courage, understanding and loy- 
alty which His friends must undergo in the hours 
just ahead. He does not dwell much on the 
gloomy, gruesome details. He does tell them that 
the Shepherd is to be smitten and the sheep scat- 
tered ; that they are all to forsake Him; that Satan 

151 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


has asked permission to try them in his sieve ex- 
pecting to get out some of them. He even warns 
Peter that he is such a small grain that Jesus has 
prayed especially for him. To be sure Peter 
gave Jesus to understand that He need waste no 
worry on him. But He touches all this rather 
lightly. Their best preparation lies in a deepened 
confidence in Him, a fuller assurance of His mas- 
tery of all conditions, a genuine devotion to His 
service with a sense of their vital importance to 
Him. He does warn them that they must be pre- 
pared for all sorts of persecutions even to being 
put to death (16:1 ff.). They must be prepared 
to get on without His physical presence. He will 
see them again, however, and will give to them a 
joy which no man can take away (16:17 ff.). 

At last they profess vigorous, understanding 
faith in Him. They know that He has come from 
God. With a sigh of relief He says: ‘‘Do ye 
now [at last] believe??? Quickly He comes to the 
end of His talk, closing with the striking words: 
‘<These things have I spoken unto you that in Me 
ye may have peace. In the world ye have tribula- 
tion: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the 
world.’? With this He turns to His Father in 
prayer: first the prayer with the Eleven at the 
gate of Gethsemane; then going on a little further 
to wrestle alone with His own grief and sorrow 
over the sin of men that crushes out His life. 

All the thought and plan and passion of the 
whole evening finds condensed expression in the 
prayer with which it closed (Chapter 17). 

It falls very obviously into three divisions, but 

152 


JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


with intimate connection of all, and so with easy 
and not sharp transitions from stage to stage. 
There about midnight or after, by, or a little 
within, the Garden, under the full moon—Pass- 
over was always at full moon—with the Kleven 
grouped about Him, Jesus ‘‘lifted up His eyes to 
heaven and said: Father, the hour has come.”’ 
It was the pivot hour of history, the destiny hour 
of humanity, the time hour on which the two 
eternities bend. All His life has led up to this 
hour; all His hopes and plans hang upon it. What 
will this One, who has called Himself Son of Man 
and permitted men to call Him Son of God, say to 
His Father in this hour? 

First He talks of Himself and His work (1-8). 
His first concern is for the glorifying of the 
Father. ‘‘Glorify Thy Son, that the Son may 
glorify Thee.’? This glory will come through 
giving eternal life to men. He has glorified the 
Father by finishing all the work He was person- 
ally to do. He has made eternal life a reality in 
these men whom it was appointed for Him to 
win directly. They are the pledge of others to be 
won; the vitalized leaven to work in, and to win, 
the mass. Hehas gotten them ‘‘out of the world,’’ 
manifested the Father’s character (name) to 
them, caused them to know that He came from 
the Father, that the Father sent Him and that 
His plans and methods were brought from the 
Father. The words of the Father they have now 
received and they thoroughly know that Jesus 
has brought God’s word and will and person to 
them. His work is done and waits its continu- 

153 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


ance in these men. The glory of the Father, 
eternal life for the world through the knowledge 
of the true God in Jesus Christ sent from God— 
this is the burden of the first section of the prayer. 
Next we hear Him talking of these men whom 
the Father has given Him (9-19). He prays for 
them, not for the world, but for these men whom 
the Father gave Him out of the world. He has 
won them, guarded them as their Savior—the 
name the Father gave Him. ‘‘Jesus’’ means 
Savior and He says He has proved Savior, save, 
alas! in the case of Judas. His loss is not in the 
deepest sense a failure, but it costs a hurt in the 
heart which we cannot appreciate. Now Jesus 
comes to the Father and leaves these men in the 
world. He knows well what an unfriendly world 
it is, how dangerous for men who do not ‘‘belong 
to this world any more than He belongs to it.’’ 
Yet He will not have them taken literally out of 
the world, for the only hope of the world is in the 
presence in it of men who are spiritually no longer 
of it. They must—all the men of Jesus must—be 
guarded from the evil of the world so that as the 
Father sent Him into the world so He may send 
them into the world. His hope and His love now 
rest upon them. He desires that they shall be 
wholly dedicated (‘‘sanctified’’) in the truth. 
It is for their sakes that He now—as ever—dedi- 
cates Himself that they, too, may be truly dedi- 
cated to God in the cause of Jesus Christ. His 
dedication means unto crucifixion, ours must mean 
no less if that way lies our service. | 
In the third place He extends His prayer to 
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JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


include not only those He has won but ‘‘them also 
that believe on Me through their word’’ (20-26). 
It is the continuous present and leaves Him ever 
praying for all believers. There are three peti- 
tions for them. The first is for their unity; the 
second for them to be with Him; the third that the 
love wherewith the Father has loved Him may be 
in them. 

This unity is here His great concern. He de- 
sires that believers ‘‘may all be one, even as we 
are one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and [ 
in Thee, that they also may be in Us.’’ The glory 
of unity with Himself which the Father has given 
the Son the Son now seeks to give—‘‘has given’’ 
—to them. That glory is ‘‘that they may be one; 
I in them, and Thou in me, that they may be per- 
fected into unity.’’ He desires that the believers 
may be so with Him that they may see the glory 
of His unity with the Father in that eternal love 
‘wherewith the Father loved Him before the 
foundation of the world.’’ The use of pronouns 
and conjunctions in these sentences emphasizes 
the demand in the will and active participation 
of each member of the unity: Father, Son, Be- 
lievers. How important then that we give atten- 
tion to this great longing of Jesus. We ought to 
try to understand what is the nature of the unity 
desired, its method of realization and its pur- 
pose. It is sinful for any followers of Jesus to be 
indifferent to it, not persistently to join Him in 
praying for it. It is no superficial organic union 
that He seeks, no subjecting of all Christendom 
or all Christians under one centralized human 

155 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


control or administration determining for believ- 
ers their beliefs, their worship, their activities in 
service. It is a spiritual unity in which every 
member draws unlimited and uninterrupted life 
from the center—God—and expresses that life 
in full activity in harmony with the united whole. 
We come into this by the perfecting of our unity 
with Christ. But we need beware of the delusion 
that we can be at one with Him while we are 
severed from one another and lack both codpera- 
tion and unity with those who are equally to be 
included in the unity of Father-Son-Believers. 
Nor must we overlook the objective before 
Jesus all the time He is praying for this 
Unity. Each time He prays for the unity He 
expresses the purpose, the end it is intended 
to serve and accomplish. First it is ‘‘that the 
world may believe that Thou didst send Me,’’ 
next ‘‘that the world may know that thou didst 
send Me, and lovedst them, even as Thou lov- 
edst Me.’’ Then as He comes to the climax of 
the prayer His heart seems to break in an 
agony of longing for the lost world that must be 
saved through the knowledge of Himself: ‘‘O 
righteous Father, the world did not know Thee, 
but I knew Thee.’’?’ That is why He is in the 
world. He could not stay out of it while the men 
in it did not know His Father. He could not abide 
in the glory that was His and leave men in the 
desperate shame and loss of dishonoring His 
Father. ‘‘And these came to know that Thou. 
didst send Me.’’ That is the beginning of the 
redemption of the world through knowing the 
156 | 


JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


Father. They are His hope. They are the in- 
struments through which God will answer His 
world-reaching prayer. ‘‘I made them to know 
Thy nature [‘‘name’’] and I will continue to 
make them know, so that the love with which Thou 
didst love Me may be in them, that I may even 
be in them.’’ In them He will continue to make 
the world know the Father ‘‘till all the ransomed 
church of God be saved to sin no more.’’? In 
this assurance He turns to His own private 
prayer—His Gethsemane—to His surrender to 
the world. 

If, now, we pause to look back on Him through 
that night’s words what do we see in Him? What 
revelations of Himself has He made to us? These 
stand out: 

1. There is the majesty and poise of a perfect 
surrender to service at supreme cost. He has 
shown such mastery of Himself that we think of 
the whole scene from the standpoint of His com- 
forting and heartening His disciples in their be- 
wilderment, grief and weakness. It hardly occurs 
to us that if He is just one man, even though a 
most unusual man, among the dozen, and antici- 
pating, with a clearness which they only partly 
share, that in the next hours He is to suffer in- 
sult, injustice, insolence, humiliation, judicial 
murder, then they should be encouraging and 
comforting Him. We hear Him say: ‘‘Let not 
your heart be troubled; neither let it be afraid’’; 
‘‘My peace give I unto you’’; ‘‘Believe in God, 
believe also in Me’’; ‘‘Be of good cheer, I have 
overcome the world.’? Somehow we must feel 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


that He is more than Master of Himself and of 
the situation. 

2. He is the Master of an enterprise for all 
humanity. His undertaking is of the supremest 
importance to all men. They must know Him and 
feel the force of His enterprise and respond to it 
or they are hopelessly ruined. He is really mak- 
ing Himself the hope—the one hope—of humanity. 

3. We cannot overlook His willingness to in- 
vest in His enterprise each and all His followers 
at any cost to them. He is consciously subjecting 
them to suffering, losses, persecutions, death. A 
man may have a right to invest himself thus; but 
what can justify one in assuming that ‘‘for his 
sake,’’ ‘‘in his service,’’ ‘‘for his plans,’’ they 
shall abandon all and suffer all. Jesus does not 
ask them to do it for a principle, nor for a cause, 
nor even for humanity. All these He includes in ~ 
what He places above and about them all. He 
puts it personally. He asks men to do this for 
Him. Every great idea and every noble cause 
_finds expression in a dominating person who be- 
comes identified with it; but the man commands 
and sacrifices his fellow men in the name of the 
cause and not in his own name. Jesus was not, in 
our usual use of the phrase, the incarnation of 
an idea nor the impersonating of a cause. He was 
always more than the idea and greater than His 
cause. He embodied them and included them, but 
He differs from other leaders in His own way of 
regarding Himself and in the way men regard 
Him in relation to His cause. 

4. The most amazing feature of His words and 

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JESUS PROJECTS HIS WORLD MOVEMENT 


bearing on this last night, had we not already 
naturalized it in our thinking of Him, is His calm 
assumption of absolute authority to interpret God 
and to command the activities of the Holy Spirit. 
He tells God’s nature, ideals, plans, purposes with 
a tone of unquestioning finality that still does not 
betray the slightest consciousness of daring. He 
even says as if it were a commonplace that His 
followers should have known: ‘‘He that hath seen 
Me hath seen the Father.’’ He tells the functions 
of the Holy Spirit whom He, equally with the 
Father, will send to carry on His work. He re- 
lates all the meaning and ministry of the Holy 
Spirit to His own person and plans. On the basis 
of such assumptions of reality and authority He 
projects and predicts history. Is He right in His 
estimate of Himself or were the Jews right in 
making an end of Him because of even so small a 
part of such claims as they grasped? ‘‘Who is 
this Son of Man?’’ 


159 


CHAPTER X 


JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS HIS FOLLOWERS TO CARRY 
HIS SALVATION TO ALL MEN (Luke 24) 


(Cf. John 20:19-21:23; Matt. 28:16-20; Mark 
16: 14-20; Acts 1: 1-11) 

The last chapter of Luke gives us the clearest 
and fullest account of the first day after the resur- 
rection. Here alone, supplemented by a few 
verses in John, we have the story of His first meet- 
ing, in the evening, with a group of His disciples. 
Here then we properly begin our study of the 
Resurrection Words of Jesus. 

Early in the day some women of the following 
of Jesus had gone to the tomb with spices which 
they had prepared, and returned to report that the 
body was gone from the tomb and that they had 
seen a vision of two angels who told them that 
Jesus was alive. Mary Magdalene claimed to 
have seen Him and to have talked briefly with 
Him. The apostles regarded this ‘‘as idle talk,’’ 
yet Peter and John ran to investigate and ‘‘found 
it even so as the women said: but Him they saw 
not.’’ Rumors rose and spread and excitement 
filled the group of followers. 

The experience of the two who went in the after- 
noon from Jerusalem to Emmaus forms an in- 
teresting and instructive link in the story. They 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


were intently discussing what had occurred when 
a third person approached and for a time walked 
along, silently and drawing no attention from the 
two. At length He asks what words these are that 
they are so vigorously exchanging evidently with 
excited intensity. They stopped still in the road 
scowling. One of them, Cleopas by name, replied 
in an amazed and rebuking tone: ‘‘Do you live 
off to one side alone in Jerusalem, and didn’t find 
out what was going on there in these days?’’ All 
innocently Jesus draws them out by saying, 
‘What things?’’, as if there could be but one 
topic in all the city on this day. It is a very 
graphic summary they give if we allow the col- 
loquial form of speech to get over into English: 
‘*The things concerning Jesus the Nazarene, who 
got to be a prophet man powerful in work and 
word in the face of God and of all the populace, 
how our chief priests and our rulers turned Him 
over (to the Romans) for a death judgment and 
they crucified Him. Now we were cherishing the 
hope that He was the one who was going to 
liberate our Israel. Yes, and along with all this 
it comes to the third day since this occurred. But 
also some women of ours astounded us.’’ Thus 
they went on with their story. Then Jesus took 
it up: ‘‘O foolish men and slow in heart, to be- 
lieve in all things which the prophets said. Was 
it not necessary that the Christ experience all this 
and enter into His glory? And beginning from 
Moses and from all the prophets He interpreted 
to them in all the scriptures the things about Him- 
self.’’ 
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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


Thus they arrived at Emmaus, where at the 
supper table He revealed Himself to them in some 
characteristic way or word as He took the bread, 
gave thanks and gave them food. No one else did 
this like He did. They recognized Him and He 
disappeared. 

Notwithstanding all the day’s excitement and 
the seven-mile walk and the night, they set off for 
Jerusalem again, while upbraiding themselves for 
their lack of recognition. ‘‘Hadn’t their hearts 
been fired as He opened up the scriptures. Of 
course it was He. No one else could have made 
them so meaningful, so wonderful.’’ Back in 
Jerusalem they went straight to that upper room 
—probably Christ’s Passover room—which they 
knew was the meeting place of the disciple group. 
They made themselves known and gained admit- 
tance to find the excited interest very tense. They 
were greeted with the announcement, ‘‘ Really the 
Lord is risen and He has been seen by Simon.’’ 
But they must be allowed to tell their story. But 
while they were in the midst of it Jesus Himself 
suddenly took His position among them. No ex- 
planation is given. Had He come in by a win- 
dow? Speculation avails nothing here. It was 
not an apparition; no ghost as they at first 
thought. He thoroughly identified Himself. His 
first word was in effect repeating the last word at 
Gethsemane three nights before: ‘‘ Peace to you.’ 
Then while they were frightened and fearful still 
He said: ‘‘Why are ye frightened, and for what 
reason do doubts arise in your heart?’’, which at 
once recalls His saying in the Upper Room: ‘‘Let 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


not your heart be troubled, neither let it be 
afraid.’’? He invited them to touch His body and 
see that He had flesh and bones, and to examine 
the wounds in hands and feet. Then for further 
confirmation He asked for food and ate before 
them. By these means He overcame their doubts, 
quieted their fears, gratified their joy, assured 
them of His resurrection. They knew Him in- 
timately, thoroughly. They identified Him in 
spirit and in body. There was no mistaking His 
words, no other ever so spake. He began where 
He had left off talking with them before His 
death. Death had not broken the continuity of 
His life, nor of His relation to them. All was 
as He had foretold. ‘‘After a very little while’’ 
they saw Him again and were filled with that irre- 
pressible joy of which He had spoken (Cf. John 
16:16, 19-20). The personal identification was the 
first and most important thing. 

And here was His body, too. Nowadays there 
are those who question the body. They tell us ex- 
cess of credulity, over tense nerves, fear and auto- 
suggestion, some or all of these were getting in 
their work. They point to the differences in the 
use and manner of the body before and after the 
grave. All these things the disciples have dealt 
with and answered. They were there. They knew 
Him. They were absolutely convinced of His 
triumphant life, of His body’s resurrection and 
of its changed quality and handling. It is im- 
possible to resist them without becoming irra- 
tional. 

So soon as they were in proper frame for giving 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


good heed to Him Jesus began connecting His life 
and ministry with their experience and mission. 
He gave them a commission. Every time He 
meets a group of His disciples after His resurrec- 
tion it is to give them this commission, with vary- 
ing emphasis, but with the one insistence. Out of 
His ‘‘High-priestly prayer’’ the Eleven could re- 
call—could not but recall—His words, ‘‘Just as 
thou didst send Me into the world, I on My part 
sent them into the world.’’ So now, at the very 
beginning, according to John’s account, He ad- 
dresses them, saying a second time, ‘‘Peace to 
you,’’ and immediately adding: ‘‘Just as the 
Father has sent Me, I, on My part, send you.”’ 
‘And on saying this He breathed on them, and 
said to them: Receive ye the Holy Spirit, whose- 
soever sins ye remit, they are remitted for them; 
whosesoever ye retain, they are retained.”’ 

We may now devote ourselves to Luke’s account 
and try to reproduce by reconstructive imagina- 
tion the picture he gives us of that first resurrec- 
tion evening together. We cannot know just how 
many or who were present besides ten of the 
Twelve. Ten, for John tells us that Thomas was 
absent. Certainly there were others, apparently 
a goodly company, twenty or thirty one may 
guess. Remembering that the Emmaus brethren 
had come some eight miles after supper and reck- 
oning time for the appearance of Jesus and for 
quieting and assuring the company, and reaching 
a condition where Jesus might wisely begin His 
discussion, we may suppose it was around nine in 
the evening when He said: ‘*‘ These are My words 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


which I spake unto you while I was yet with you, 
that all things must be fulfilled, which are written 
in the law of Moses and in the Prophets and in 
the Psalms, concerning Me.’’ They ought not to 
have been so staggered by His cruel and shameful 
death, nor now so amazed that death had not been 
able to hold Him. For a year He had been telling 
them of all this. It was only what a right reading 
of their Scriptures would disclose that had been 
done. 

In His words, ‘‘while I was yet with you,’’ He 
has suggested that His presence now is different, 
temporary. It is no longer to be as in the former 
days. Every word they hear now will be signifi- 
eant, precious. He desires them to be instructed 
accurately, sufficiently, so that they will have 
working convictions and directions. ‘‘Then 
opened He their minds that they might under- 
stand the scriptures.’’ Perhaps this is Luke’s 
equivalent of John’s words that ‘‘He breathed on 
them and said: Receive ye the Holy Spirit.’’ We 
cannot suppose that He depended on their recall- 
ing all the scripture they needed to know and on 
their interpreting it correctly. Luke surely means 
for us to understand that into the opened minds 
Jesus poured the scriptures as He interpreted 
and applied them. He has spoken of things 
written concerning Himself in each of the three 
divisions of the Scriptures into which the Jews 
classified them. We must suppose that from each 
of these divisions He selected such parts as would 
best enable them to understand Him and His re- 
lation to God’s plan in the Hebrew revelation and 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


history. He was the fulfillment of God’s purpose 
and working. 

They may well have had there in the room rolls 
of the Scriptures from which they had been seek- 
ing some light and understanding during the dark 
days of His entombment. He would not need 
these, but to have them might make more real 
their interpretation by Jesus. 

From the summing up which He gave at the 
end we may easily find some of the sections which 
He certainly unfolded to them, and we may be 
fairly sure in case of others. ‘‘In the law of 
Moses’’ we eannot think of His not beginning 
with that first promise that the seed of the woman 
should bruise the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). 
There can be no doubt about His emphasizing 
God’s plan announced in the call of Abraham, to 
make him a blessing such that in him and his seed 
all the families of the earth should be blessed, 
and that faith, issuing in obedience, made of 
Abraham a ‘‘friend of God’’ and constituted the 
beginning of God’s revelation in history. 

When Moses halted the refugee Hebrews at 
Sinai to organize them into a nation his first mes- 
sage from God was the revelation of God’s pur- 
pose in their deliverance and the condition of His 
covenant with them and His care of them. Before 
giving them even the Ten Commandments and 
the rest of their moral law, before their system of 
worship or any political organization and civil in- 
stitutions, God gave them a national ideal (Ex. 
19: 1-6). God’s call to them was moral and eth- 
ical. He was not excluding others, but adopting 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


a method to realize His interest in all nations, 
‘for all the earth is Mine,’’ He said; and Israel 
must be for Him a priestly nation to lead the na- 
tions in the worship of their God. We could with 
much probability designate other parts of the 
law of Moses which Jesus used on that night. 
These are the most obvious and will suffice. 
When we turn to ‘‘the prophets’’ we are at 
once embarrassed with the wealth of material. 
Our studies have led us at every turn to follow 
Jesus in interpreting these great spiritual mes- 
sages of God. In the summary of His teachings 
He quotes from the forty-third and forty-fourth 
chapters of Isaiah so that we may know He used 
these chapters, in both of which God explained 
that His purpose in calling, saving, preserving 
His people was that they might be His witnesses, 
in the presence of all the nations of the world, that 
He alone is God and Savior. The same message 
is to be found in Amos and Micah, in Jeremiah 
and Zechariah. Joel would so easily provide Peter 
a text for Pentecost if a few weeks earlier he had 
heard Jesus interpret it. The passages about the 
suffering Servant, like Isa. 49, 53, Hosea in 
many places would explain the death and resur- 
rection and be explained by them. Daniel, Ezekiel 
and much of Isaiah would link up the followers of 
the Redeemer with Him in the redemptive work. 
The closing chapter of Isa. (66: 18-24) would now 
be understood to set out strongly God’s purpose 
to gather all nations and from them all to choose 
priests and Levites to serve even as the Jewish 
priests did. This new heavens and new earth 
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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


which Jehovah means to create He keeps ever be- 
fore Himself as goal and end; and He also keeps 
always in mind as the means for reaching this 
goal the spiritual seed of His people. 

The prophecies of the Holy Spirit and His part 
in the redeeming work we have seen in one of our 
studies. These Jesus would bring forward at this 
time. 

Of ‘‘the Psalms’’ that He must have used we 
can now have no question about the second, 
twenty-second, fortieth, sixty-seventh, ninety- 
sixth. They deal with the universalism of His 
reign, His sufferings, His dedication to His under- 
taking, the place of God’s people in attracting, 
winning and welcoming all peoples to their God. 

Thus the hours went by as the awed, wondering, 
inspired men and women sat and stood about their 
Lord as He opened up to them their Bible. Their 
eyes were wide, their mouths often agape in 
amazement, as their hearts burned within them 
at the new understanding of God’s word and 
ways. 

It would be toward the morning when Jesus 
paused in His teaching and summed up for His 
eager listeners what He has found for them in 
these scriptures. ‘‘Thus it is written,’’ He said. 
That is what God put into His revelation. If we 
read it as God meant it we will find in it what 
Jesus found. Here it is as He outlined it in ré- 
sumé: 

1 ‘‘The Christ (Messiah) should suffer, and 
rise again from the dead the third day.’’ This 
He adduced from all that great body of the writ- 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


ings of Isaiah which set forth the suffering of 
Jehovah’s Servant and the outcome of that suffer- 
ing in a great extension of redemption and right- 
eousness until all the people of the world should 
be included: ‘‘the peoples from far’’ and the in- 
habitants of ‘‘the isles’’; from the unselfish, 
suffering love of Hosea in behalf of an errant, 
dissolute wife; from the experiences of Jeremiah, 
and his messages to all the nations; from Jonah’s 
story and the parable of death and resurrection 
which He had previously drawn from the ex- 
periences of that prophet; from the crucifixion 
psalm, (22). The Suffering Redeeming Serv- 
ant in the Prophets is sometimes the nation, her- 
self needing repentance and cleansing, but al- 
ways with a view to her being thereby fitted for 
large helpfulness; more often it is the faithful be- 
lievers—‘‘the Spiritual Israel’’—who must suffer 
with, in and for the sinful nation and for the 
heathen world, and in whose deliverance there will 
come salvation for the nations; most intimately it 
is some individual, whose description finds no 
adequate bearer until Jesus comes and stands 
among men, lives among them, dies in their midst 
and at their hands, appropriating to Himself the 
prophetic outline and now, in the light of His 
recent experiences, incorporating His own believ- 
ers with Himself in a saving enterprise that calls 
on them to give themselves at all cost to the re- 
deeming work. 

2. ‘‘Repentance and remission of sins should 
be preached in His name.’’ Every stage and al- 
most every page of the Old Testament bears the 

169 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


call to repentance; and the perfect insight of 
Jesus saw this initial necessity for man if he will 
come to righteousness and truth, to God and His 
Kingdom. ‘‘Repentance must be preached.’’ Re- 
morse men cannot avoid; resentment and self- 
commiseration they freely indulge; but repent- 
ance, turning back from their sins in shame and 
humiliation to seek forgiveness and grace for 
better conduct, these come from the call of God 
to their souls. We easily blame our circum- 
stances and lament our misfortunes, but Christ 
Jesus calls us to the consciousness of our own 
responsibility and the guilt of our own undoing. 
He does not overlook the forces of environment 
and heredity which set the soul sinward and blow 
upon the sails to drive to doom. No less than 
the heavenly Father ‘‘He knoweth our frame, He 
remembereth that we are dust.’’ Yet He knows 
that a man cannot be righteous without the will, 
the purpose, the active response to an urge to 
manhood. And this conception has for its reverse 
side the use of the autonomy of individual free- 
dom to accept and use the evil urge to work un- 
righteousness and to grow in sin. The will may 
be weak, but it has its direction. The purpose may 
be frail, but it may incline to this side or that. 
The Gospel of Jesus Christ sets up the holiness 
of God as the contrast that convicts of sin; and 
provides for the taking away of sin and guilt as 
inviting to repentance; and offers to faith, 
through a rebirth and constant renewal, the re- 
enforcement of will and effective energy to work 
righteousness and achieve character. 
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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


Jesus well knew—never another half so well— 
all the modern psychologists tell us of the in- 
stincts and the habits, but He was no determinist. 
He knew the tremendous force of behaviorism, but 
He was dead set against yielding to the inherit- 
ance from the past, and surrendering to the mo- 
mentum of the mass. His call was always that a 
man must not be ‘‘behavioristic,’’ but by turning 
from the soul’s limitations, repenting of its vices, 
receiving the manifold grace of God, one should 
escape the behavioristic way of weak determin- 
ism and enter the sphere of a ‘‘new humanity,”’ 
whose ideal and goal is ‘‘to will and do the things 
that please God well.’’ 

From what is to us the Old Testament He gives 
to His followers support of His own consciousness 
that God has thought all history worked for the 
call of man out of his natureism, animalism, be- 
haviorism; and that now in Him deliverance is 
amplified and becomes determinative in the prog- 
ress of the human race. 

3. Hence this preaching of repentance of sins 
by men and the taking away of sins by God must 
extend ‘‘unto all the nations.’’ He had no trouble 
showing to ‘‘minds opened to understand the 
scriptures’’ that this was the range of God’s pur- 
pose from Abraham to Himself. No stage of 
‘election’? had ever meant exclusion, but always 
was the calling of some to be the means of bless- 
ing the many. Moses and all the prophets would 
proclaim this truth with an emphasis that only 
blindness could overlook, and lead all who saw 
with God to see ‘‘His mercies and righteous reign. 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


reaching from sea to sea, and from the river unto 
the ends of the earth.’’ There could be no true 
understanding of God’s blessings on any group 
that was not interpreted in the terms of that 
temple chorus of Ps. 67: 


“‘God, even our own God, will bless us. 
God will bless us; 
And all the ends of the earth shall reverence 

Him.”’ i 

One of the messages from Isaiah which Jesus 
brought to His audience that night (43: 8-13) 
was a call of Jehovah that all the nations of the 
world be brought together in a conference for the 
comparison of their religions. The spiritually 
‘‘blind’’ ‘‘have eyes’’; the religiously ‘‘deaf’’ 
‘‘have ears.’’? Let them all assemble and defend 
their faiths and justify their ways from their his- 
tory and moral outcome. If they cannot thus jus- 
tify their ways let them listen to Jehovah’s mes- 
sage and exclaim: ‘‘That is the truth.’’ Jesus 
says the day has now come for this conference, 
this comparison, this turning to God’s good mes- 
sage. 

The preaching properly begins in Jerusalem, 
but there it has only its beginning. Speedily, 
steadily, persistently, faithfully it must be 
‘‘nreached unto all the nations.’’ 

4, ‘‘Ye are witnesses of these things.’’ Jesus 
is here quoting the words which in Isa. 43:10 
follow immediately on Jehovah’s call for the con- 
ference of the nations for comparing religions. 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


He turns now to His people and says: ‘‘Ye are My 
witnesses,’’ and proceeds to explain that it is for 
this purpose that He has chosen them to be His 
servant; that they might know Him, believe Him, 
understand that He is the one God, besides whom 
there is no Savior. He has all along declared this, 
saved people and so proved His saving purpose 
and power, so that it is no new message, but an 
approved truth which He asks His people to pre- 
sent to the nations. Then He repeats: ‘‘There- 
fore, ye are My witnesses,’’ adding for their en- 
couragement and assurance in testifying for Him, 
‘‘and I am God, yea, from this day forward I am 
He; and there is none that can deliver out of My 
hand; I will work and who can hinder it?’’ The 
same message and call to be Jehovah’s witnesses 
is given, somewhat more briefly, in 44:6-8. This 
call Jesus now makes to His followers and com- 
missions them to bear this witness to the ends of 
the earth. 

5. But they are not yet ready to begin. It is 
not their witness alone even as He told them 
the night of the betrayal. It is a joint witness. 
The words are ours, the power is His. ‘‘And be- 
hold [see here], I send forth the promise of My 
Father upon you; and do you wait in the city until 
you are clothed with power from on High.’’ This 
promise of the Father was part of the program of 
the Son for His servants. So definitely God had 
linked the Redeemer, the Holy Spirit, the message 
and its heralds in Isa. 59:20-21. Jesus is still 
loyal to the plan of His Father, revealed equally 
in His Bible and in His consciousness. It is futile 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


for men to testify of Christ apart from the Spirit. 
The Spirit bears His testimony in the words and 
works of believers. There is a wonderful phrase 
in Judges (6:34, margin) which says ‘‘The Spirit 
of Jehovah clothed Himself with Gideon.’’ We 
are to be garments: for the working God. On 
Pentecost we are told that the Holy Spirit filled 
the room where the witnesses were waiting, so 
that they were in Him; then we are told that they 
were all (singly) filled with the Holy Spirit. This 
union is what Jesus provided. We are clothed 
with the Holy Spirit, and He clothes Himself in 
us, and Christ Jesus becomes known, and saves 
the world. 

This commission Jesus renews some time later, 
as recorded in Matt. 28. The exact time we 
cannot tell. He sent messages to His disciples 
to meet Him in Galilee (verse 7), where disciples 
were most numerous. Matthew tells us only of 
the Eleven, Paul tells us of more than five hun- 
dred (I Cor. 15:6). The emphasis in this com- 
mission is a bit different, but the content and pur- 
pose are the same as on this first meeting. He 
has entire authority in His program, in heaven 
and on earth, and so responsibility for all man- 
kind. With this authority and to meet this re- 
sponsibility He commissions His people to go and 
make disciples of all the nations, to teach them 
all His principles. And He pledges His own 
presence with them all the days until and into the 
consummation of the age. He is counting on this 
method, through believing men working with Him, 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


to bring to completion the age of redemption 
which He has inaugurated. 

Forty days after the Resurrection He is again 
at Jerusalem with a group who number ‘‘about a 
hundred and twenty.’’ In this period He has 
‘‘given commandment through the Holy Spirit 
unto the apostles whom He had chosen,’’ given 
them definitive evidence of His living reality, and 
has spoken to them all necessary ‘‘things con- 
cerning the Kingdom of Heaven.’’ He charges 
them once again not to depart from Jerusalem, 
but to wait there for the fulfillment of the promise 
of the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist had intro- 
duced water baptism as a symbol of His message. 
Jesus had taken it over and deepened its meaning. 
Now He refers to this baptism of John and puts 
over against it as still necessary for the work of 
His witnesses—and more necessary—the baptism 
of the Holy Spirit which they are to receive in 
a few days. He leads the little group—the net 
working product of His ministry—out to the 
mount of Olives. He declines to discuss with them 
any topic but that one of their representing Him 
in the world as His witnesses. This time the 
emphasis is on the witnessing in a geographically 
enlarging campaign. They are to begin ‘‘in 
Jerusalem’’; then ‘‘in all Judea and Samaria’’; 
thus reaching out ‘‘unto the uttermost part of the 
earth.’’ For this work they are to receive power 
when the Holy Spirit comes upon them. With 
these words—these last words: ‘‘witnesses unto 
the uttermost part of the earth—as they were 

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THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


looking He was taken up; and a cloud received 
Him out of their sight.’? His words are ended— 
the words of this one Friend—words no one of 
which we can wish to have changed, nor for which 
we need ever apologize (as P. W. Wilson has so 
strikingly said). Fittingly these last Ascension 
words are recorded in Acts (1:1-11)—not else- 
where—in Acts, which is the first chapter in the 
history of the witnessing to Jesus by the Holy 
Spirit through the redeemed seed of the Christ 
of God. | 

In the Resurrection Words of Jesus what im- 
pression does He make? What self-expression 
do we hear? | 

1. He makes Himself the key to the under- 
standing of the Bible. That is most remarkable. 
He does not use the scriptures to explain Himself, 
but Himself to explain the Scriptures. “The 
meaning of all parts of it, the relative importance 
and the right emphasis, are all to be determined 
by how they relate to Him. Thus for their Bible, 
the Old Testament. He made it Old by providing 
for a New Testament. Yet so far as we know 
He said never a word to any disciple of His about 
writing of Him. He made it inevitable and the 
Holy Spirit witnessing with them and within 
them taught them where and what to write as it 
might be needed in the use of the campaign on 
which He sent them and His Spirit. Thus every 
New Testament word derives its meaning and 
application from Him. He made Himself the key 
to the whole Bible. 

2. Equally He made Himself the key to God’s 

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JESUS, RISEN, COMMISSIONS FOLLOWERS 


plan in history. He does not give, but He is the 
plan of God’s world-making and remaking, Paul 
is but reflecting this teaching of Jesus when He 
tells us that God projected His plan of the Ages 
in Christ Jesus (Eph. 3:11), as saith also 
Hebrews 1:2, which declares that God made Him 
‘‘the heir of all things’’ because ‘‘through Him 
He had constructed the ages.’ : 

3. Jesus makes Himself the hope of humanity. 
He reasserts this in all the commissions by in- 
evitable implication. His gospel—the gospel of 
Himself—must be preached unto all nations and 
all must be made disciples of Him. 

4. Jesus assumes all the way through this 
period, what we have seen in all His ministry 
growing into ever-increasing clearness and em- 
phasis, that He is the Master of all godly men. 
He has not hesitated from the first day to say to 
any man, ‘‘Follow me,’’ at whatever cost. Now 
He commissions these men of God, with an au- 
thority unlimited, to the work which He has 
planned. This is the Jesus whom we have to in- 
terpret—the Jesus to whom each one of us must 
make his answer. 


177 


EPILOGUE 


Now that we have tried to listen with mind 
and heart to Jesus of Nazareth as He spoke sig- 
nificant words on strategic oecasions in His life, 
what has He seemed to be saying concerning His 
own conception of Himself? or what has He said 
of Himself when He seemed not to be talking of 
Himself, and yet was revealing most deeply the 
quality of His personality? 

1. He assumes a relation to God that no other 
ever assumed, when He called Him ‘‘ My Father.’’ 
This is our first look into His consciousness. It 
is deep, but seems very clear. It is a boy’s con- 
sciousness; but it is the characteristic note of His 
thought of Himself in relation to God without 
ever a questioning, with never a shadow of waver- 
ing. And He longs with intense longing that all 
men shall share this relation, receive from Him 
right to address God by the same word. 

2. He dedicates His life to the fulfillment of a 
purpose so staggering in its holiness and its full- 
ness as to take away our breath as we hear Him 
undertaking ‘‘to fulfill all righteousness.’’ He 
asks to be buried symbolically in His baptism into 
this purpose—an idea which more and more 
clearly forms a definite feature of His aim and 
expectation. 

3. He fights out every aspect of temptation and 
comes forth ‘‘full of the Holy Spirit’’ to live and 

178 


EPILOGUE 


labor and suffer by principles that involve abso- 
lute self-denial, the use of none but the appeals of 
truth and character, to live only in worshipful 
obedience to every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God. 

4, Selecting one of the highest scriptures set- 
ting forth God’s purpose in His promised Mes- 
siah, He makes claim of being its fulfillment and 
of inaugurating the long promised and eagerly ex- 
pected ‘‘day of Jehovah’s favor.’’ As His min- 
istry proceeds He steps inevitably into picture 
after picture of Messianic prophecy as the central 
figure. He makes a claim to a relation to the Old 
Testament program and promise that no human 
being ought ever to think of making. 

0. He assumes leadership of ‘‘the Kingdom of 
Heaven’’ and announces ideals for those who fol- 
low Him into that Kingdom that are the despair 
and the hope of humanity through all the centu- 
ries. He outreaches the ideals of all ethical teach- 
ers since the world began, corrects Moses, goes to 
the heart of every form of conduct and announces 
that men will be judged by Him on the basis of 
their attitude to His ideals and especially to Him- 
self, 

6. In the face of deep disappointment with the 
ethical shallowness and spiritual superficiality of 
men He will not surrender, but assumes the moral 
burden of the race and invites all weary men to 
come to Him for relief. 

7. He announces His method of winning—by 
the cross—that startles all His followers and loses 
Him most of them. Yet He stedfastly sets His 

179 


THE SELF-INTERPRETATION OF JESUS 


face for the cross and calls every man who wishes 
to follow Him to deny himself and come on in His 
way. 

8. He exults in the thought of death, seeing in 
His falling into the earth the multiplying oppor- 
tunity of the grain of wheat, and declares that by 
being ‘‘lifted up from the earth’’ He will ‘‘draw 
all men unto Himself.’’ 

9. He assumes command of men, control of the 
Holy Spirit, absolute interpreting of God, and 
mastery of the destiny of the world, all at the mo- 
ment when He is passing into the Hclipse of the 
Cross. 

10. After having been buried in a tomb sealed 
by a Roman officer, He appears repeatedly to His 
friends and commissions them to take up Him 
and press forward the world enterprise He claims 
to have inaugurated. And they did it—have been 
doing it these nineteen hundred years. To-day He 
is not only the supreme figure of history, the cen- 
ter of conflict in thought and in social theory, but 
the creative force, the challenging personality, the 
shining hope of humanity. 

How shall we explain all this? What shall we 
say about Him? Did He dream all these high 
things and still succeed in maintaining a poise 
and sanity that save Him through sixty genera- 
tions from any suggestion of madness? Did He 
form all these high dreams and claims into a pro- 
gram and then succeed in ‘‘getting by with it’? 
until this shrewd twentieth century, when men 
have grown learned enough and scientific enough 
to discern His error? 

180 


EPILOGUE 


Did His peasant and fisher followers imagine a 
fanciful Christ and foist Him on their own 
generation with projectile power that would not 
exhaust itself but continue to increase through 
two millenniums? 

Is He the Christ of God, the Savior of Men, 
the Builder of the Kingdom of Heaven? What 
is He to me? 


THE END 


181 








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